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posted by martyb on Friday December 19 2014, @12:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the internet-of-things-gone-wild! dept.

It that time of year again — Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease. The website that lets you attempt to control a Griswold-style Christmas light display from your web browser is back online for one last year. The website is totally free but also raises awareness and funds for charity via optional/voluntary donations — over $80,000 for the Center for Celiac Research.

In Alek's own words:

A question often asked is how much does it cost to light the holiday display — the electrical meter does spin a bit faster. That's easy to calculate - with all 25,000 lights ON, the current draw is 76.2 amps. Multiply by 120 Volts and divide by 1,000 to get 9.1 KiloWatts. The electricity cost in Colorado is about 10 cents per KiloWatt-Hour, so to run the display continuously for an hour, it costs 91 cents/hour - not much! But remember that Internet Surfers are turning the lights on & off ... so divide that by two and then multiply by the 5 hours/day it's active, and the electricty costs 227 cents per day. Multiply that by 31 days and for $70, a whole month of holiday fun is provided to people around the world ... plus some awareness and thousands of dollars in donations for Celiac Disease Research!

[Ed's note: What are the best holiday light displays you've found on-line?]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:18PM (#127498)

    Zoom in the map and the house appears to be in the middle of a reservoir. Does anybody see an address for this house?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:19PM (#127499)

    I clicked 1 thing. 9 hour wait.

    Think I shall skip that...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @06:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @06:02PM (#127537)

    If you haven't seen the video from years back of the yard of the guy who really got the Christmas lights thing in high gear, it's worth a look.
    Carson Williams [wikipedia.org]
    Christmas.Lights+Wizards.in.Winter [google.com]

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:04PM (#127732)

    I tend to watch telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl [blinkenlights.nl]