Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is another one of those “okay, maybe not”: I certainly wasn’t wondering. But in case someone else was:

How much would the Griswolds have spent lighting up their house in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”?

Spoiler:

Hypothetically, Mr. [Gil} Quiniones [president and chief executive of ComEd] said if the lights worked and the power stayed on for at least eight hours a day, using C9 incandescent bulbs, it would have cost the family $287 a day or $8,885 per month, based on what ComEd charges customers in 2024.

This is assuming that they used standard incandescent lights, and that the lights worked:

Most electricity experts and dedicated fans who have tried to calculate how much power and money all those lights would have required 35 years ago have come to a similar, sobering conclusion.
There’s no way a typical 1989 home could have powered 25,000 incandescent lightbulbs.
One Reddit user laid out a theory, solved through various equations and simulations on a spreadsheet, that determined if Clark bypassed the home’s circuit breaker, the house’s copper wires would vaporize and “every wire in the house will immediately ignite.”

…

A blogger used the spinning power meter depicted in the film to estimate that the lights would have caused a 25 percent load increase on the Chicago power grid.

Also, just for the record, there is no “auxilliary nuclear” switch. Though if I was a president with ComEd, I’d have my people wire one up…that does absolutely nothing. Except maybe light an LED. It’d have to be one of those giant knife switches, though, like something out of “Frankenstein”.

Speaking of LEDs…

If the Griswolds used modern LED lights, popularized in the past two decades and about 90 percent more energy efficient, he said it would still cost the family about $34 a day or $1,054 a month. That final bill would not include the rest of the home’s power usage.

…

About 360 miles east of Chicago, a family in Wadsworth, Ohio, has been lighting up their home in almost the exact Clark Griswold-fashion — without breaking the bank each year, causing brownouts or bothering their neighbors.
For over a decade, Greg and Rachel Osterland, along with their two children, have decorated their home with 25,000 lightbulbs (not one more or less, according to Mr. Osterland) to raise money for cystic fibrosis research. Hundreds of people went to watch the house’s lighting this year, complete with audience drumrolls and a rendition of “Joy to the World,” just like Clark sings in the movie.

…

As a lifelong fan of the movie, Mr. Osterland has done the math quite a few times. He determined that if the Griswolds lived in his area in 2024 and used the C9 incandescent bulbs, they would have paid about $4,656 a month for 175,000 watts of electricity. Although, like others, Mr. Osterland realized that there’s no way a regular house could have taken on that much power without some kind of a boost.
So instead of Clark’s imported Italian twinkle lights that are likely incandescent bulbs, Mr. Osterland uses LED lights that all plug into one outlet. After buying their home in 2008 the couple saved up for years to buy the lights to replicate the Griswold house, which cost them about $12,500.

…

Powering the light display for about six hours a day for 30 days costs the Osterlands about $25 a month. Mr. Osterland estimates that the lights use about 600 watts of electricity in a month, much less than the hundreds of thousands of watts used by the Griswolds.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2024 at 9:31 am and is filed under Christmas, Movies, Wondering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.