re: Permanently installed LED "Christmas" lights.

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I just paid one of those companies that installs Christma lights to hang 150ft of the Govee Permanent outdoor lights. Looks amazing.

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Did they attach them directly to the bottom of the soffit with the lights facing straight down? I've seen some people put a shim at the edge of their eve that angles the light a little towards their house.

If you have different levels and dormers are they easy to customer cut to the correct size you need them and add extensions from the center of the strings to reach dormers?

Cad, Watch these videos. They give a lot of insight.

DIY Permanent Holiday LEDs: Complete How To Guide 2021

3 Years Later: DIY Permanent Holiday LEDs - What worked, what didn't, and what's new?

Put the tree up and in addition to the 900 regular warm white leds, I added 300 individually addressable Leds (stings). The wife approves and the kid had been adding animations via his tablet.

A really nice upgrade to our setup.

Good luck. Dry fit test them on the ground before you put them up.

Not enough pics in this thread. I've been wanting to dive into the permanent lights, but I'm so intimidated for some reason. I pretty techy, and it still makes my head spin when I get too deep. Now we are in a house we will be in for a while and I have a kid on the way so next Christmas I'm going to have to actually put up some lights

Whelp, I got bit by the freeze/thaw cycles here. two nights ago, I noticed about the last 1/3 of my LEDs not working. Unfortunately, they are right over the peak on the front door. I initially thought that the jumper between the end of one strand and the start of the next had gone bad and rebuilt that. However, after some troubleshooting, I'm going to have to replace a couple of LED's at the end and beginning of two strips. Of course, this is a power injection point so that is going to complicate things, but nothing I can't fix.

At least it's not at the top of the roof line.


Edit: Patched them up enough to make it through the Holiday season. It's not pretty, but it's functional. I'll do a more Permanent fix when it's above 40 degs outside...

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Not enough pics in this thread

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As stated before, mine are not really permanent but c9-like 5050 ws2811 LED hung on PVC pipes on the gutters. So I’m a bit fat cheater, and you can skip the pictures if you want. But that said, you can buy the same LED without the strawberry diffuser in a permanent aluminum track, or 12mm “bullets” and “permatrack” and get all these same effects (except my garland and tiny trees. I’ll be doing this across the front of the house in a couple of days as well and extending the ground LED in my front yard to the end of their respective beds giving me around 1100 working lights when I’m done.
But I’m boring, so I set them to static Christmas colors and have WLED cycle them every 20m or so.


Results:








And a 150 light proof of concept that I will do across the front (which has 6x 9ft garlands, 2x 4 foot Christmas trees. I plan on either bringing the garland over the windows in the front down or going back up “over the top” of my round door with my garland, but I haven’t decided which of those I like better. Only that I don’t like my current install (garland hanger from Balsam Hill) which gives me different heights.).






DigOcta + 200w PSU is sitting in the corner. The last run across the front will take my 8th output on it and the first that I’ll actually require power injection for (400 consecutive 12v 12mm nodes, so I’ll inject around 150, 300, end of run if needed because 150 on this door does fine- I don’t run brightest white ever, and I’ve got the whole setup limited to about 8a anyway, but I think it looks sharp enough that I’m not itching to upgrade the power or brightness capabilities). Half considering adding leaping arches next year, but I’m leaning more towards a pair of megatrees instead. Or learning to be happy with what I’ve got and what I’ve done so far. The board is on wifi, but I’ll be dropping Ethernet to it soon (maybe this weekend) as it is in a weird spot and has had intermittent network connectivity requiring reboot (though maybe that’s not the actual problem).


The roof outline + ground lights will get pulled on Mardi Gras (they’ll be purple, gold, and green starting 1/6). They’ll come back out to play around October 1 of next year.

I have Hue down lights on my porch. I have GledOpto 12v uplights throughout the yard (20ish?). I have a fairly extensive Apple Shortcut that was calling up my scenes. Then when I added the WLED stuff, I got HomeAssistant involved, and the shortcut calls the WLED playlist (through a fake HomeKit switch). For whatever reason, it calls my red/white preset instead of the actual playlist. I plan to rewrite all my lighting ‘programming’ in HomeAssistant but haven’t gotten around to it just yet (and trying to bandaid my original solution, because I spent a long time on it finding holidays and coordinating light colors, alternating RG and GR for nights of the weeks on Christmas, writing for a November day that falls after Thanksgiving, and then using multiple (7) dynamic scenes for each of the days of the week in October).

And here's a way too low rez gif from a few years ago of a few of our lights.



The view here from right to left is: The side of my garage, our dining room, front porch, and guest bedroom/office. That is the same way the data signal travels. This is about 1/2 of my leds.

Where my recent failure occurred was the last led of the strip over our dining room and the first led over front porch.