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.
I tried Govee outdoor lights.
The app has some ridiculously invasive permissions required to operate that have absolutely nothing to do with turning a light on/off and changing the color. Goodbye privacy.
The lights were also VERY far from permanent, they lasted through a couple months of mild weather and light use. No snow, no flooding or heavy rain, no direct sun, no extreme heat, no evident physical damage. In my case it wasn’t just one light that went, it was the whole strand and the way it failed left me feeling worried that it was a fire hazard. Their outdoor lights are not well made enough to be left outdoors for long. I would not recommend Govee lights to anyone.