The best outdoor Christmas light projectors

The stake-in-the-lawn laser that put projectors on suburban streets. Covers a large facade in seconds, and looks like a laser projector rather than like lights — know which you want.

A projector is the opposite trade to string lights. String lights are hours of work and look like a lit house. A projector is two minutes of work and looks like a projected effect. Both are legitimate; confusing them is the mistake.

Star Shower is the unit most people picture. It stakes into the lawn, plugs in, and throws moving points of laser light across the whole front of the house — an area that would take several hundred feet of string light and a full day on a ladder.

Lasers produce points, not washes. On a textured surface like brick or stucco the effect is good; on a flat, dark, modern facade it can look sparse. And in fog or falling snow, the beam itself becomes visible and the whole thing turns hazy.

One genuine responsibility: aim it at your house and only at your house. Laser light crossing into a neighbor's windows or toward a road is a nuisance and, near an airport, a legal problem. Stake it close and angle it up at the wall, not out across the property line.

More control than the single-effect units: app operation, multiple patterns and scheduling. That control is what stops a projector looking like the same effect every night.

The weakness of a single-effect projector is that a month is a long time to look at one pattern. Multi-effect units with app control let the display change, which is the difference between a feature and a novelty that wears off by the 10th.

Airivo's outdoor projector runs several patterns with app-based selection and scheduling. The built-in timer is worth counting as a saving — it is a separate outdoor timer you do not have to buy and weatherproof.

Everything else is generic to laser projection: strong on textured surfaces, thin on flat dark ones, hazy in fog, and it must be aimed at your own house.

More features means more failure surface. A one-button unit has almost nothing to go wrong; this has an app, a radio and a schedule. If you want the simplest possible thing, the single-effect option above is a better buy.

Two independently controlled outdoor outlets with sunset-offset scheduling. It is the only control type that gives you both automatic sunset tracking and a hard off time.

The control problem has two halves. You want the lights on when it actually gets dark, which moves through the season, and off at a fixed civilized hour. A clock timer solves the second and fails the first. A photocell solves the first and fails the second.

A smart plug with sunset-offset scheduling solves both: on at sunset plus fifteen minutes, off at 11:00 pm, and the on-time moves itself as the season progresses. That is the actual answer, and it is why smart plugs have displaced timers for people who already have decent Wi-Fi outside.

The KP400 has two independently switched outdoor outlets, so the roofline and the inflatables can be on different schedules from one device — useful, because an inflatable at 2:00 am is a different proposition from the roofline.

Two real cautions. Wi-Fi at an outdoor outlet on the far side of the house is often marginal; test coverage there before you commit the whole display to it. And check the combined amp rating against your load — smart plugs typically carry a lower rating than a 15 A mechanical timer, and that ceiling is easy to miss.