In an environmentally friendly move that’s expected to save money for the town as well as supporting businesses and individuals, the New Canaan Chamber of Commerce next holiday season will start using new energy-efficient white bulbs in the trees downtown.
Hutchinson Tree Care removes the white lights from trees on Elm Street in January 2015. Credit: Michael Dinan
The cost of installing, replacing and removing the bulbs that adorn trees on Main, Elm and Forest Streets is about $20,000 per year, according to Tucker Murphy, the chamber’s executive director.
Officials have wanted to switch to LED bulbs but the only ones available in the past were “harsh blue-gray and we didn’t like the light,” Murphy said.
“They’ve finally come out with a [LED] bulb that has that soft, warm, mellow glow, so we are starting to transfer over to LEDs,” she said.
Murphy announced the switchover at the May 16 meeting of the Plan of Conservation and Development Implementation Committee.
This year, all of Forest will be done with the LEDs—the physical work of installing and removing the lights is carried out by New Canaan’s Hutchinson Tree Care Specialists—and the new bulbs will be swapped in for the incandescent bulbs that burn out in other areas of town.
The lights generally go up in October and are removed in January, Murphy said. Ten years ago, the merchants footed the bill for the bulbs alone—in more recent years, the chamber has shifted some of the cost to residents who are willing to support the downtown holiday effort (and the chamber now has a nonprofit foundation set up for the purpose of accepting donations).
The lights themselves are powered by electrical circuits fed through lampposts downtown—a cost that the town bears—so the energy-efficient bulbs also will reduce that use and bill for taxpayers.