Permanent outdoor Christmas lights, compared

The DIY end of permanent holiday lighting: RGBIC LEDs in a track you mount once, app-controlled, at a fraction of a professionally installed system. The install is genuinely a weekend, and the warranty is short.

Permanent holiday lighting is a track of addressable LEDs mounted under the eave and left there. It is on for Christmas, and then for Halloween, and then as warm-white accent lighting in March. The reason people buy it is not Christmas; it is never climbing a ladder in December again.

The market splits cleanly in two. Professionally installed systems — Trimlight, JellyFish, Gemstone, EverLights and others — are dealer-installed, run several thousand dollars on a typical home, and carry long warranties. Govee is the DIY end: you buy the kit, you mount it, and it costs a fraction of that.

What you are actually buying with the professional systems is the install and the warranty, not better LEDs. Trimlight publishes a lifetime product warranty; Govee's is one year. If a channel section fails in year three, the difference between those two positions is the whole product.

Do not buy this expecting it to be invisible. Every permanent system is a visible track under the eave in daylight. The good ones are color-matched to the fascia and read as trim. None of them disappear, and any marketing that implies otherwise is overselling.

We have not installed this system ourselves. The warranty terms and control features above are the manufacturers' published figures, and the comparison page linked from here lays out where each brand's numbers come from.

The same two-outlet smart plug idea inside Govee's app. Worth choosing specifically if your permanent lights or other outdoor lighting already live there.

There is no strong technical reason to pick one brand of outdoor smart plug over another. They all switch two outlets and run a schedule. The reason to choose is which app you are already in.

If you have Govee permanent lighting, or Govee string lights, putting the plug in the same app means one schedule, one scene, one place to turn everything off. Running the roofline in one app and the inflatables in another is the kind of small friction that ends with you turning things on by hand.

If you are not already in that ecosystem, the Kasa option above is equally good and there is nothing to choose between them.

The same practical limits apply: check Wi-Fi reach at the outdoor outlet, and check the amp rating against what you are plugging in.

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.