Electrical Safety for your outdoor holiday display

Whether your putting up a holiday display for the first time or your a seasoned veteran, they are a few simple rules to follow to have a safe display. Before putting up your first strand of lights you need to know a few things. How much wattage is your diplay going to take? This can be figured out by adding up the wattage of all your light you are going to use in your display plu any motors or other effects. So let's say you were going to string 300 C9 bulbs across your house. A C9 bulb is 9 watts so multiplying that by 300 we get 2700 watts, divided that buy 120 and we get 22.5 amps. The average household circuit is 15 amps so you would need 2 circuits to power them all. Even if you had 20 amp circuits you would still need two and a good rule of thumb is to never load a circuit over 80% capacity so for 15 amp circuits that is 1440 watts or 12 amps and for a 20 amp circuit it is 1920 watts or 16 amps. So after you get the totals of all your lights you can figure out how many circuits you will require. Since these are going to be outdoors they all should be Ground Fault protected. A ground fault occurs when any of the electricity you are using to power something such as your lights escapes to ground. So if your lights were all wet from rain or melting snow and you had a ground fault condition and somebody touched the string of lights they would pass the leaked electricity (ground fault) through them and to earth resulting in a shock. To prevent this you can use a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter or GFCI. GFCI's can either be a breaker in your electrical panel, an outlet you plug your lights into or a cord or device that has a built in GFCI. As a electrician I have install many outside receptacles for people and they are always using a GFCI receptacle. In fact electrical code states that any outlets installed outside, in a garage or crawl space must be GFCI protected and if there outside have a in use cover which means a cover that will close with a cord plugged in.

So now you have your electrical up to specs you need to check all your lights to check for breaks in the insulation and to make sure they are working. Now your are set to string them up in your display, but we have another rule to follow. If you are using the older incandescent lights you need to follow the rule of three, that is plug in no more than 3 strings together end to end. The wire they make the lights with is only good for a certain amount of current and if you exceed that amount the wire can get hot and melt the insulation off. If you have the newer LED lights you need to check the manufacturers directions on the pack to find out how many you can safely plug end to end. When you are putting up your lights you should not use staples, as they can nick the insulation and crush the wire of your light string. They make insulating staples you can use that protect the wire or use clips or ties designed for outdoor holiday lights. By following a few simple rules you can have not only a festive holiday display but a safe one as well.