re: Permanently installed LED "Christmas" lights.

Do you do any sequencing with xlights or vixen?

Think I am going to start converting over from my static sequencing in Vixen to pixels and go xlights or vixen because I want to get some permanent installed lights.

Found these guys, they have a lot of good info on pixels as well. I mostly hang out on the DIY christmas forums to build your own controllers as such, but it looks to be pretty easy to get what I want for a good cost without going that route with pixels.

LINK /

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But my DigOcta can act as a controllable object in xlights.

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Nice, yeah I got a few arches, a 48 string mega tree (16 strings of white/blue/green) but its only like 12' tall. Got some mini trees and mini lamp posts in white and blue lining the driveway. House outline is done in white and blue, wreaths on each window in white and blue. Bunch of other things in white and blue and some yard wireframes of Rudolph with a channel for his nose, Frosty, and various other things like presents under the megatree, star, ornaments on the megatree. Got two renard64s with 95 channels going right now and two renard24s driving the megatree strands. Be nice to have a lot finer control with pixels. It's been years since I put it up prior to this year so pixels weren't as much a thing when I built it up, but my kid is old enough to help setup and really wanted to do lights this year. Now that she has seems some videos of pixel sequencing, she really wants us to get into that.

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How are you using them in a non-permanent way?

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Check a few posts up. The picture of my door with 2 trees and garland is 150 (3x50 count of 4” spaced) 12mm 12v bullets. If you see the “front of house” picture, I’m going to rewrap the other garland (the one on the side door is 9’, each of the ones on the front of the house is a pair of 9’, so another 300 nodes for that and then 2 more 4’ trees (another 100 nodes there). Waiting on some power injector T and xconnect pigtails to come in.

I really thought I’d do the side door and leave the project for next year. I think it looks so nice to mirror the effects on the house (and just the big, round end on the 12mm vs the thin pointy standard mini light) that I’ll be doing it for only a few weeks of enjoyment.

Mine are all on the perimeter of flower beds, so it’s not terribly hard. If you’ve ever run 12v landscape lighting, it’s only about that hard. Most of my wires are exposed, but they’re not terribly obvious/ugly. Since I’m not permanent, this is an option.
If you wanted to go permanent, you’d probably want direct burial cable or conduit/raceway in certain areas.

It’s also possible that if you have really long runs, you can convert your data wire to an Ethernet wire and get essentially unlimited distance over it, and then have power running to it separately (or use multiple PSU in this way, if that is appealing)


I actually have zero power injection at this time. My first attempt will be next week.

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Tell me you run on 12v without telling me you run on 12v...

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How far do y’all go without power injection with the 12v?

My house lights on the front should be about 500 lights total. I’ll naturally have the PSU and digiquad at about the 200 mark.

I’ve got a 117 run of c9 (30mm) and a 150 node run of 12mm. Neither are injected. I don’t run the brightest white and have no desire to for my setup. Even when playing and looking at the brightest white, I can’t tell on the 117 strand. On the 150, there is a very slight dimming vs 150 from 1.
I limit my total brightness for all of this to 8A (100w roughly), and it’s plenty bright. Probably more noticeable if I “took the brakes off,” but I see no need to.


For my 400 node run that’s upcoming, I’ll put power after 150 and at the end, probably, but I will see how it looks with injecting at 250 alone first. Ideally you should get ~120 at max bright, max white on 12v before seeing some loss. Power is a silly thing. It runs, nearly interrupted until you start “sipping” off of it. So you should be able to go about 240 pixels from a single injection (120 ‘forwards’ like when you start a strip/string, but also 120 ‘backwards’ when you actually have a middle point.

For a 200 + 300, you’ll have to play with it. The 200, you shouldn’t need to inject in the middle, but you should also run power to the end. The 300, you can probably inject at 200 and be fine.


But again- I haven’t done any real world testing with injection yet. And me being happy with simple, static colors with 100w for 650 pixels doesn’t mean that you will be happy with it.
I’m hoping that I should have my new pigtails and additional strands by Thursday. I will take some pictures of a 400 pixel run then and post the differences in brightness with/without injection- I will probably just take pictures of the bundles of pixels rather than the “set up” version. Which I guess I could do today. But I’m lazy.


The whole thing may sort of fall apart when I nearly double the number of total pixels (have probably 70 more to put in the yard, too) and only have 100w dedicated to it. I can up my max allowed current to 200w with my current PSU, so I’ll make notes of that too.

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How many feet?

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Roughly 110 ft. I am figuring about 3in spacing between pixels.

Yeah, my napkin math came out to be 425. I bought 500 to be safe.

My box will be at pixel 210 so I’ll have to run power/data to the beginning anyways. It’s over the garage so it should be easy.

On the other end, I have the option of putting a 2nd psu if I really want to. While building the house, I at least had the foresight so put outlets in the eaves for Christmas lights so that’s how I plan to power everything. These outlets just so happen to be at #210 and the very end of my run. At this point I’m just trying to figure out if it’s easier to run power to the very end or put the 2nd psu there.

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On the other end, I have the option of putting a 2nd psu if I really want to

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Totally doable to run two power supplies, but you have to connect the low voltage grounds if you have all the pixels in one continuous string.

Personally, RUNNING the power injection wires wasn't difficult. I ran some in my eves/soffit, some in the aluminum LED channels and some in the gutters. The hard part was soldering the injection the wire to the individual LEDs. If a run of LEDS was over 5 meters in length, found the 18 gauge wire I used to run PI too thick to solder directly to the pads on the LED strips. So I had to step down to 20 or 22 AWG for a few inches and then solder those to the strips. This step down led to having more injection points as I was getting off color LED's with the 5v strips I used. I prototyped everything on the ground before I put them up to get the injection points dialed. And of course the longest run of my system runs over the highest point of my house.

After the hindsight of putting in security camera all over my house, if I were to do it again, I'd run one 16 or 18 gauge (I used 3 strand 18 AWG) power injection wire directly from the power supply to the far end(s) of the system in the attic and other strategic (hidden) points along the way. That would have saved me trying to run large power injection wire in the aluminum channels. Quiet often, I had to separate the positive and negative wires from the jacket and data wire to get them to fit. 5 or 10' of 22 awg in the channels wouldn't be nearly as hard as what I ended up doing. Trying to "hammer" down the plastic diffusers onto the channels 15-20' in the air wasn't a great experience for someone who's not comfortable at height. But I have easy access to my attic and for the most part can move around up their pretty easily. Oh, and 1 more thing. If you do go the attic route. ALWAYS leave a line to fish wire/string(s) in place hidden in the eves so if you have to rework something, it's a much easier task.

I'm no expert on any of this, I can just tell you my mistakes/experiences to help other people avoid them.
Good luck!

ETA: Here's the wire I used. 100ft.18AWG Low Voltage LED Cable 3 Conductor White Sleeve in-Wall Speaker Wire UL Class 2 Certified

And here are the water proof connectors I'll be be installing this summer. 4 Pin Waterproof Male Female Connector Cable RGB The wire gauge is pretty small on these, but I'm more interested in preserving the data signal with these.

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What gauge wire would you use for that?

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There's an App for that...

LED Power injection calculator

RGB Pixel Light Power Calculator