The best tools for planning a Christmas light display

Point it along the gutter, press the button, get the length. This turns the worst part of planning — measuring a roofline you cannot easily reach — into thirty seconds from the driveway.

Every planning question on this site starts with one number: how many feet of roofline you are lighting. Get it wrong and you either buy too little and stop mid-install, or too much and leave a box unopened.

Measuring it is the problem. A roofline is twenty feet up, usually interrupted by a gable, and measuring it with a tape means a ladder and a helper and a lot of repositioning. A laser measure does it from the driveway: aim along the gutter line, press once, read the number.

The GLM 20 reaches 65 feet and Bosch rates it to an eighth of an inch. Neither figure is the limiting factor here — for light planning you are rounding to the nearest foot anyway. What matters is that it is one button, because a tool with a menu is a tool you have to re-learn every November.

Two honest caveats. The dot is hard to see in bright daylight at range, so measure in the morning or on an overcast day. And a 30-foot tape plus somebody to hold the end costs nothing and works fine — this buys speed and safety, not a result you cannot otherwise get.

A long-standout tape. Standout is the spec nobody looks at and the one that matters here: a tape that holds itself rigid is a tape you can use alone, up a ladder.

Standout is how far a tape extends unsupported before it folds over. On a cheap tape that is about six feet. On a FatMax it is substantially more, and the difference decides whether you can measure something while holding a ladder with the other hand.

That is the actual use case here. You are on a ladder checking that your clip spacing is holding at 12 inches and that the last bulb lands where the gutter ends. With a floppy tape you need a second person; with a stiff one you do not.

It is also the tool for the small measurements that decide a display: the spacing between clips, the height of a porch column you are wrapping, the width of a garage door header.

For the long roofline number, the laser measure above is faster and safer. These are complementary, not alternatives, and between them they cover every measurement on this site.

For ground-level distances — path edges, bed perimeters, the run out to the mailbox — a wheel beats a laser, because the path is not straight and the laser only does straight.

Laser measures do straight lines. A front path curves, a garden bed is a rough oval, and the cord run from the outlet to the inflatable goes around the porch. None of those is a straight line, and all of them are distances you need before you order.

A measuring wheel handles curves by rolling along them. Walk the path edge, read the counter, and you have the number of feet of stake-mounted lights to buy.

Accuracy degrades over distance as small slips accumulate, but for this purpose an error of a foot in fifty is irrelevant — you are buying string light in 25-foot sets anyway.

It is a single-purpose tool that will live in the garage for eleven months a year. If you are lighting one straight path, pace it out and multiply; the wheel is for people with a genuinely complicated yard.