I have seen permanent outdoor led lights you can mount once, and manually change which color patterns there are based on the season.
However I’m skeptical of amazon reviews and skeptical that anything outdoor can last more than a year or two.
Has anyone had success with something similar? I like the idea of mounting once, using it a couple times a year and leaving it up for a purpose and not to be tacky.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually have these, but I started looking into them quite a bit last year after seeing a bunch of houses in our neighborhood start doing them. I ended up deciding against them. This is from memory from last year’s research, things may be different now.
Govee does seem to be the “big name” in so far as there actually is one for these things. Talked to several people and that’s what they got. Reviews of them seem decent if you trust reviews in general.
What you get is some number of ~16ft strings that you chain together. You also get (I think) one or two empty non-lighted strings to bridge gaps.
There is no easy way to replace one if it burns out, they don’t make or sell singles, and won’t even sell you a replacement short string of them. They also don’t make or sell extra empty connector strings. If you want/need replacements or more connectors, you go to eBay, where people sell their spares for way more than they’re really worth.
My kids have the RGB LED strips in their rooms (not these permanent lights, just the little sticky tape with dots on it thing) and every single one we’ve gotten ends up having colors stop working, after a few months you’ll get three or four dots in a row where one of the three colors stopped working so, like, it can’t be pure blue anymore. And they just keep getting worse over time, more segments losing colors. It’s one thing on these cheesy little $20 LED strips on the ceiling, it’d be a much bigger issue if you’d spent several hundred dollars on these and needed a 20 foot ladder to fix.
So that, and the inability to get replacements, is what stopped me. After watching all these LED strips start losing colors and going wonky, I just don’t trust that these “permanent” lights would really be permanent. And if they fail there is no easy way to fix or replace. So to me it just didn’t seem worth it.
As long as the cables are soft, don’t expect them to last. Oh, they are all soft? Well…
I just bought Govee lights this year and put them up. It was a couple hundred dollars vs $4800 for professional permanent lights. I don’t know how long they’ll last, but I know I’m getting too old to be climbing on my roof.
Overall I like the lights, but I have nothing to compare them with. They’ve been up since just before Halloween.
Govee seems to be the best off-the-shelf option for this as nobody else has really pursued this mostly hobbist market outside of custom installers like you mentioned.
I also think they should last quite a while since they’ll be mounted up in the soffit outside of any direct sun or rain exposure which is what’s bad for electronics.
With LEDs in general the power supply is usually what makes a good one. Bean counters love to save money there because you can design a supply with very few parts, if you add a few more you can have a good supply. A better quality supply will have protection for itself and the lights. LEDs really like to run at their rated voltage, and they hate power spikes.
For lights used outside the IP rating (how water resistant it is) usually needs to be taken with a few grains of salt.
If I wanted something permanent-ish I would talk to people that install it professionally.
While I have done Christmas lighting, I have never done Christmas light fixtures themselves. I do a lot of outdoor lighting for work. For my own personal stuff at home I always make my own power supplies.
Some friends of mine did this, but they got it through a service, not Amazon. I don’t recall how long they’ve had them out, though. I think maybe a year at most, or maybe two. Not very long.
