Clearly, I wasn’t able to put the show together for 2007. Despite my grand hopes for the year, other commitments and projects took up the bulk of my time and I wasn’t able to spend nearly as much time on the display as I had hoped. But I’m still very excited about putting this together for 2008. All I was able to do this year light wise was put up a few thousand lights (a mix of incandescent and LED), drawing around 1050W. Ho hum.
Speaking of LED lights - they clearly are ‘the future’ of holiday lighting, but they’ve always been too dim and the colors just a bit off. But that is changing. While many LED strings were still too dim for my tastes, I did find a set that was fantastic. The Sylvania (made by Inliten actually) C4 LED light strings that Wal-Mart and some Home Depots had are great. I have 8 of these 60 light strings around the property. They are some of the most brilliant LED Christmas lights I have seen. One reason they may be so bright is they have three power supplies along the string in small green plastic boxes while most LED strings only have one power supply in the plug. This lets them drive more powerful LEDs and reduce voltage drops in the long wires.
Sylvania’s white strings are also very bright, but are still ‘cool white’ not ’soft white’, which I expect to change in a year or two. But the color strings are fantastic, with five colors (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, and Orange). But they aren’t cheap ($10 for 60 at Wal-Mart). Costco had a soft white LED string, though they weren’t very bright, but they looked more like normal incandescent lights than most white LED lights.
I expect my display will still be mostly incandescent lights, simply due to cost. It’ll be a few more years before LED strings are anywhere near as cheap as current incandescent strings. Plus, while they are looking better and better each year, they’ll never have the warmth of incandescent lights - which I think will always have a place in holiday displays.
So thanks for stopping by! Sorry I wasn’t able to pull things together this year. But I’m definitely going to do this, just for the fun of building and coding everything.
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