The holiday season is upon us, and for many of us that means Christmas lights. For some of us, way too many Christmas lights:
A question that comes to mind when seeing some of that extravagance is “how much does that cost to run”? Well, if you’re not quite ready for a whole-house energy monitoring system, there’s actually a neat little device out there that can tell you just how much power you’re using in any given outlet: the Kill A Watt
From the wattage, you can estimate how much power you’re using by converting to kilowatts and then multiplying by $0.10 (10 cents per hour is a decent approximation, but you can check your power bill to see exactly how much you’re being billed). That’s how much you’re paying per hour. So, in the above screen shot, the lights on my Christmas Tree are using about 37 watts, or 0.037 kilowatts. For every hour these lights are on, it costs me $0.0037 – less than a penny per hour! Another way to think of it is to simply say “for every thousand watts I use for an hour, it costs me 10 cents”. Of course, for extravagant displays that are using multiple kilowatts for many hours, the costs can quickly add up.
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use their own custom firmware to power these devices. But there is an open-source project called 
to the same terminals, restore power. It’s easy to do and doesn’t involve any wiring changes at all.
. Amazon also has a dedicated 
– and that can be done with pretty much any 
with output in the 9-12V range. You can connect the lights to the DC power strip by using an adapter like 
, or soldering the leads directly to the strip. Make sure to test the connection before soldering, since the lights will only work if the leads are connected to the right terminals.
for that finished look:
.
, today we’ll cover the steps for installing an Insteon-enabled outlet inside.
). While both have a non-controlled receptacle for things like blenders and vacuum cleaners, the dimming model is really only good for lamps and could cause damage to other devices. It’s rated for 300 watts (as opposed to the non-dimming model’s 480 watts), but it’s dual-band, which is a big plus.
the 
down a 
solution using a 
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wired with a 
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