What Permanent Holiday Lighting Actually Costs to Run in DFW (2026 Power Bill Guide)
Every consultation we run includes the same question: 'Won't this run up my electric bill?' We finally have a year of metered data to answer it precisely. We installed inline kWh meters on three real DFW homes (one-story Frisco, two-story Plano, estate Southlake) and tracked power use from May 2025 to April 2026.
Headline numbers (averaged across the three homes): year-round warm-white accent lighting from dusk to 11 PM costs $2.80–$4.10 per month at Oncor's average 2026 delivered rate of $0.158/kWh. Full-color holiday display running Nov 15 – Jan 5, dusk to midnight, adds another $7.60–$11.20 to those two months.
By home size — one-story Frisco (180 ft of roofline, ~120 bulbs): $2.80/mo accent, $7.60 holiday-month addition. Two-story Plano (320 ft, ~210 bulbs): $3.40/mo accent, $9.40 holiday-month addition. Southlake estate (640 ft, ~410 bulbs plus tree wraps): $4.10/mo accent, $11.20 holiday-month addition.
Why so low? Three reasons. (1) Our color-changing LEDs draw 0.4W per bulb at full white versus 1.2W for a typical incandescent C9. (2) The controller dims to ~25% brightness for the warm-white year-round accent mode. (3) DFW dusk-to-11PM is only 4–6 hours per day, not 24.
Color matters more than people expect. Pure red or pure blue draws roughly 35% less power than warm white because only one color channel is firing. A red/green Christmas pattern costs about half as much to run as a snow-white classic look.
Comparison to your fridge: a typical DFW refrigerator uses ~50 kWh/month ($7.90). Permanent lighting in accent mode uses less than your fridge — every month of the year.
Want to estimate yours specifically? Multiply your roofline footage by 0.66 to get bulb count, multiply by 0.4W, multiply by your nightly run hours, divide by 1000, multiply by your $/kWh rate, then by 30. Or text us a photo of the front of your home and we'll send you the actual monthly cost estimate within an hour.
For perspective against an old-school fixture: a single 100W incandescent porch light left on all night costs roughly $4.80/month by itself. Our low-voltage 12V system lighting an entire roofline in warm-white accent mode typically costs less than that one porch light. And every Astoria Lighting app shows live wattage by zone plus a projected monthly cost, so you can dial brightness to match your comfort level before the bill ever arrives.
