Decorative LED holiday lights appear to be catching on in homes across the country. With the nation’s most iconic Christmas trees lighting the way — the White House and Rockefeller Center trees are decked out in LEDs — retailers are reporting brisk sales for the lights this season, despite the rough economy.

Jean Niemi, a spokeswoman for Home Depot, said that her company is posting a triple-digit increase in LED holiday light sales compared with 2008. And Christmas Lights Etc., an online retailer, announced a 200 percent increase in LED sales over last year.

“People are really starting to get it this year,” Ms. Niemi said.

Jagdish Rebello, an electronics market analyst at iSuppli, said that LEDs would account for 25 to 50 percent of total holiday light sales this year, despite prices that can be two to three times as high as traditional incandescent holiday lights.

Over 100 million decorative light strings are expected to be sold in the United States this year, according to government statistics.

Alex Baker, the lighting program manager with Energy Star, a government energy-efficiency rating system for lighting and other products, pointed to government data that says that LEDs use up to 90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs to produce the same amount of light, and can last up to 10 times as long.

He also said holiday lights transform only about 5 percent of the power that they use into light, while the rest is emitted as heat. Colored incandescent holiday lights are even less efficient, with as little as 1 percent of the energy being converted to light.

“You can have a bunch of lights heating the great outdoors,” Mr. Baker said.
In head-to-head performance tests, Consumer Reports found some incandescent holiday lights burned more brightly than LEDs, but that LEDs were “much more durable, ran cooler and posed a lower fire risk, and cost less to operate.”

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