Our Past Christmas Lights...

The 2007 Christmas Season

Our first attempt at anything Christmas-y was in the 2007 season. Our house looked like this:


We ended up winning 2nd place in the neighborhood's Christmas light contest. Woo hoo! This spurned us onto try new things. Thus began the path down the animated light show dark side...



The 2008 Christmas Season


We started in November 2008, with one 16 channel box. Two more 16 channel boxes were ordered, arriving on the day before Christmas. The most visible improvement was making each candy cane dance...

Technical Specs about the 2008 Light Show

2008 Highlights

48 channels of lights



Approximate light count:
13 foot Red/Green Light Tree1,200
Garage Display50
Driveway25 Huge C7 lights
Front Porch area (wreath, gift boxes, etc)300
Main Lawn area200
Train, gifts
Merry Christmas sign		200
Tree area
(candy canes, lights in tree)		300
Total:2075 lights (more or less)

Lessons Learned from 2008's season

The 2008 season made us realize a few important things:

  • 2008: Get a better FM transmitter for people to listen to the music. The Whole House FM Transmitter sucks.
  • 2009: Ordered Rameses FM25B transmitter...a MUCH better FM transmitter.

  • 2008: Setup the lights/decorations so they will survive hurricane force winds. Winds trashed anything that was not nailed down.
  • 2009: Everything will be nailed down.

  • 2008: We need more LOR boxes to control more lights.
  • 2009: An increase from 3 boxes to 14, 12 active, 2 spares, for total of 172 channels used.

  • 2008: Convert ALL lights to LED lights (versus regular, power-hogging mini-lights).
  • 2009: Most of the 18,000+ lights are newly procured LED lights, including the house spotlights

  • 2008: Get things setup early. Local media coverage of local Christmas light shows starts around the first week of December, so we want to be ready for that.
  • 2009: Opening day: Friday after Thanksgiving December 4th. Be there.

The 2009 Christmas Season

To be filled in as lessons are learned this year :)



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