Do fairy lights use a lot of electricity?
The short answer is no. Here is the maths, so you can check it against your own bill.
Somewhere along the way, fairy lights picked up a reputation they never really earned, that draping a room or a garden in them would show up as a spike on the electricity bill. It is worth actually doing the maths.
No, fairy lights do not use a lot of electricity. Modern warm white LED fairy lights consume between two and five watts per strand, costing mere cents per month to run on mains power. Solar fairy lights draw zero electricity from the grid, powering themselves entirely through stored daylight.
Lighting Type |
Average Power Draw |
Estimated Cost per 8-Hour Evening (SA Tariff) |
Grid Independence |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional Incandescent Bulbs |
40 to 60 watts per strand |
R0.80 to R1.20 per evening |
Zero (fails during load shedding) |
Modern LED Fairy Lights (Mains / USB) |
2 to 5 watts per strand |
R0.04 to R0.08 per evening |
Zero (requires battery bank or inverter) |
Solar Powered LED Fairy Lights |
0 watts from grid (self-powered) |
R0.00 (completely free to operate) |
100% (charges by day, glows all night) |
When decorating a bedroom, framing a patio pergola, or weaving lights through a garden tree, many homeowners worry that running fairy lights every evening will lead to a surprising spike in their monthly electricity bill.
The short answer is reassuring: modern fairy lights consume remarkably little electricity. Understanding how LED technology works helps explain why you can enjoy a warm evening glow every night of the year without worrying about power costs.
The pipes and nozzles metaphor: understanding electrical flow
To understand why fairy lights use so little energy, consider how water flows through pipes:
Incandescent filaments
Traditional incandescent bulbs are like wide-open pipes. Electric current pours through a high-resistance tungsten wire, generating immense heat and wasting over ninety percent of its energy as thermal loss just to produce a small amount of light.
Modern LED diodes
Modern LEDs operate like precision nozzles. A Light Emitting Diode uses a microscopic semiconductor chip to convert electrical current directly into photons with virtually zero thermal loss. You get the same warm visual glow while using a tiny fraction of the electrical stream.
What does this mean for your electricity bill?
A standard 20-metre strand of Litehouse LED fairy lights draws approximately 3.6 watts. If you leave that strand illuminated for eight hours every evening, it consumes less than 0.03 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day.
At current South African municipal electricity tariffs, running that strand every single night costs less than two rand for the entire month. You can illuminate an entire bedroom headboard, window frame, or stoep ceiling for less than the price of a takeaway coffee.
Complete independence with solar fairy lights
If you want atmospheric lighting without adding a single cent to your monthly bill, solar fairy lights offer the ultimate solution:
Zero operating cost
Equipped with a compact monocrystalline solar stake, solar fairy lights harvest sunlight throughout the day to recharge an internal lithium battery.
Load shedding resilience
Because they operate independently of the national grid, your garden and stoep stay gently illuminated even during load shedding and municipal power interruptions.
Discover our complete Fairy Lights collection for indoor bedrooms and outdoor garden living. If you are preparing to mount a new set, see our guide on how to hang fairy lights indoors and out.
Supported by a 2-year warranty and trusted by 57,000+ customers.
Once you have done the maths, the only real question left is where to hang them.
Complete your space.
