How To Set Up Permanent Animated Christmas Lights on YOUR House

If you’re like me, I really enjoy having a display put together for different holidays. But with each holiday it can be a lot of work to put up and then have to take down lights after each one.

So, how do you go about setting up permanent lights but make it look good on the house? We’ll go into that topic here as I show the tools and set up I have for permanent lights on the house.

Setting up some permanent lights doesn’t have to expensive or even difficult. It’s as simple as finding the right lights and then setting up a simple controller as well as having the power supply ready to go.

Light Modules

One of the products I decided to go with is from WiredWatts.com and it’s a pixel bar as seen in this image below.

House Outline Pixel Bars

These light modules or pixel bars are super easy to set up and use. They come in one-meter strips and can be cut to fit as needed. You can snap in your pixels, connect the pixel bars, and with the 3M Sticky back, you will not have to worry about the lights coming down.

My advice is that when you do select your area to put these pixel bars up, make sure that’s where you want them to be because it will be almost impossible to get them to come off.

The LED’s that come with these light modules have three pixels and they all run on the same address. Just keep this in mind when you design a light show.

Note – in the video, I had noted that these were discontinued. After speaking with Ken from Wired Watts, I was assured that more were on the way, just not for the same (2019) Christmas season, so that is why he marked them as such!

Putting Your Lights Up

When deciding where you want to put your lights be sure to record the measurements so that you know roughly how long you need your strips to be before you start cutting them to fit.

These strips currently come as an ivory color and if you do want to have them match your siding, you can actually spray paint the strips if need be. They blend in very well with your house and nobody would know from a distance that you have permanent lights up.

As I mentioned earlier, be sure to decide where you want the lights, measure how much you will need, and then purchase the light modules.

Once you have your light modules ready, you can start installing them on the house. With the 3M Stick Back, this will make the project very easy at this point.

If you do have some triangle points on the roof that you’re working with be sure to start measuring at the point first so that you know where you need to cut your light modules. This will help keep your setup symmetrical with the rest of the house.

Running Wire

If you have attic space in our home, this could be very beneficial for setting up your controller and power supply. With my current setup, I did get a little creative on how to run wire and where.

For my house, I was able to just drill a hole in the roof soffit and run wire through there, so that it wasn’t visible on the outside.

For the wiring, I decided to go with the LED 18/3 wire and then I would be able to wire these pixels back to the controller I had set up in the attic space.

This type of wiring is more of a hybrid between the regular wire and dual injection because I am only using it for one power supply set up. I can just connect the positive and negative together so that the data flowed the correct way.

Once I had all of the wire set up I was able to get the controller and power supply testes and ready to go.

If you’re still new to this type of project be sure to check out my articles on the power supply and how to set up a controller before getting started.