Somehow or another, this is has never been an official topic on TKP. We should fix that because I know how creative and crazy some of you are.
This is my first year in my new house. Although I do not have a ton of money to throw around at it right now, lighting displays is one of my favorite parts of the season. If working Amusement Parks for 16 years has taught me anything, its that exterior illumination can totally transform a place.
It is a bit early now ( 11/4), but I figured it would give everyone some time to share ideas, tips and tricks for displays. Then when they start going up, lets see what everyone has!
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If you don't go full Griswald do you even decorate?
Early?? Mine are going up Saturday. To hell with missing a 70 degree day to put up Christmas lights!
If you put a ton into it, they take awhile to get up anyway.
I have lots of random strings of lights laying around but I have to buy. I also have no exterior outlets on the house at the moment so I will have to fix that as well.
moved into a new (to me) place last summer. Come this time last year I discovered how few there are, but they had put in floodlights on every corner so I just screwed in those adapter thingies for our lights.
I've since installed 4 more outdoor outlets, but I kind of liked not having to run the lights down to knee level when they were all strung at or above gutter height anyway.
I do have some of these, but pulling some exterior outlets out of the main panel shouldn't be too much of a chore and will be nice to have later.
There are some horror storys associated with those things so always be cautious. They generally involve people using lights meant for indoors or plugging in things other than lights. It's the lack of ground that does it. And whether or not your fixtures are grounded properly too.
I have 6 rolls of C9 60' lights I run around my gutter line. I would love to do all my roof lines but my roof pitch is insane.
Last year I put everything up and had a strand not working. Absolutely infuriating.
Have to downvote you on principle, only acceptable time to put up xmas stuff is after Thanksgiving, and they have to come down after New Years. Its science
Those rules don't apply to outdoor lights.
In a normal year, I would agree with this take.
In 2020, BRING ON THE CHRISTMAS CHEER!!!!
He didn't say he was turning them all on right now. It's fine to start planning beforehand. Gives you more time to enjoy Thanksgiving weekend, and it's also nice in those years with a late Thanksgiving so you can actually enjoy the decorations. Actually, I think I've had a couple of years where I had everything hooked up and ready to flip the switch as soon as Santa slides through Herald Square.
Oh no we're turning those babies on. This is our second Christmas in our new house and we love decorating it lol. I used to be post thanksgiving decorations but we like to enjoy them longer in our new place.
HokieEnginerd would totally Griswold our house if he had the time and space. He would also probably start decorating now if I would let him (and the HOA wouldn't have a hissy fit). On a related note, the Bull Run Festival of Lights opens up Friday and Sirius is playing Christmas music...
Depending upon what your HOA is like, giving them a hissy fit could be worth it just as a matter of principle. Never had one, but know that some can be real ____s and can see how it would be fun to needle them.
"2 inches over regulation!"
My wife loves a healthy Xmas light show. Xmas is her fave holiday. It means much roof and ladder work for me....
Our house , 2017:
Our house , 2018:
Our house , 2019 (more subdued as we had just lost 2 dogs in 2 days over Thanksgiving - we weren't into it as much last year). We also used wreaths in many windows vs previous years):
Good god what a gorgeous house!
Thanks. It's been a labor of love. When we bought it in 2014 it was in SERIOUS disrepair.
We ran a BnB in it for three years (Christiansburg, VA), but wife wanted to do other things so we don't do that any more. Her room designs are period (house built in 1906) and really nice.
When we finish the kitchen and family room work it'll likely be for sale (3500+ sq ft).
I caught him in the front yard. I shot his ass. Merry Christmas.
I moved last summer, so I kept things somewhat minimal as I was still getting a feel for the house. But this year, I got the exterior outlet fixed on the front of the house, and discovered that it's controlled by a switch inside. For the first time, I'll have two separate outlets to run decorations from. I'll probably run the inflatables off the back outlet with one of the remote controls built in, and then have most of the lights plugged into the front with the switch. The inflatables will probably stay on most of the month, other than serious weather times.
I forgot I even made this thread. Here is what I ended up with this year; first in the house. I really did not spend any money this year. Most of the lights up were given to me.
Dude! Off the charts beautiful! Would be in my drive by list if i lived nearby.
My lesson learned this year is that I'm tired of inflatables.
At one point, I had 9 across the yard. Then the yard guys came to blow the leaves out and screwed a few of them up. I had to take one down so I could repair it as the loops at the bottom got ripped off, so there was nothing to anchor it with. Later, two more went down when their power supplies died, and it's not worth it to buy new supplies. I thought about getting a $15 random inflatable from Wal-mart to strip for parts, until I realized that the power supplies on those weren't big enough to replace the ones that crapped out.
So I was down to 6 for most of the season, and the minion inflatable kept getting pushed around by the wind, even after I doubled up on the stakes.
I'll be shifting my focus to lights and other decorations next year. I discovered long strings of C6 bulbs (or C9, I don't know, they're bigger sized bulbs) with stakes, and used those to line by walkway. I'm tempted to get some next year to spell something out in the yard.
Could not help myself!
Adding a little more every year. The photo can't really do it justice. The Bethlehem star on the roof is actually 7ft tall and is animated with three channels. The pole tree in the front is 20ft tall with 4 channels and a color changing 4ft star on top. It's around 5000 lights but everything is LED so the power draw is not too bad at all. First time I've ever had inflatables, but hey it's 2020.
As I was taking down the lights today I did a little reflection on the LED light strings. They are great as they draw so little power you can safely connect up to 25 strings together without worrying about the current draw as opposed to the old incandescent style which you can't really connect more than 6 or 7 max. The LEDs are more expensive than the incandescent (by 2-3x) but to me it's definitely worth it from the lower power bill and ability to run so many at once.
But my biggest takeaway this year is the brand name strings are absolutely worth the extra cost vs. the Walmart "Holiday Time" brand. I was running 23 strings of the brand names (like GE) which were all in their second year and I only had one failure. Contrast that with my 13 Walmart strings which had 7 failures, and 4 of those 7 were first year strings which failed after only a couple weeks. That's a 4% failure rate vs 54%.
I was able to get all the failed strings going again, but that meant pulling out the ladder a couple times during December. The strings failed because the leads on the individual LED diodes are super cheap and would break and or corrode to the point they wouldn't carry enough voltage to light the bulbs. You can tell it's starting to happen when half the string gets very dim, but still has just a tiny bit of light. Unfortunately even when they go out they still carry enough voltage that you can't use the voltage tester to find the bad socket, and you have to go individually through every bulb till you find the bad one. Never again with the Walmart lights.