Holiday Decoration: Christmas Home Lighting

Recommendation points

• Flexible neon
• Installation and connection to the network of flexible neon
• LED or LED garlands
• Installation and connection
• LED duralight
• Duralight connection to a 220 V network

Decorating the facade for the New Year with an electric garland or neon cord is a great idea. But how not to get tangled in the wires, how to fix them on the walls and how to properly connect to the house’s electrical network? Let’s prepare the house for the holiday together.

Owners of country houses and summer cottages have the opportunity to decorate their homes for the New Year, not only from the inside, but also from the outside. Neon cord, duralight, LED garlands – with their help, you can turn a building into a fabulous palace, shining with colorful lights.

Flexible neon

Flexible neon has many names – cold neon, electroluminescent wire, light cord. The product is a flexible PVC cord with two wires and a copper core with a phosphor running along its entire length. When a current is applied to the wire, the phosphor starts to glow, the color of the glow depends on the color of PVC. There are designs in three strands with alternate voltage supply – this provides the effect of a “crawling snake”.

Advantages of flexible neon:

• does not require careful handling – there is nothing to break and beat in a flexible wire;
• low power consumption – on average 4 Wm;
• does not heat up and is not afraid of dampness;
• safe low input voltage.

Installation and connection to the network of flexible neon

Flexible neon goes on sale in bays of 50 meters. It can be cut into arbitrary lengths. Although the cord is flexible, you can make a right angle only if you connect two separate segments with a special jumper. Serial connection of cords of different colors and thicknesses is possible. The cord is simply mounted on walls and any other surfaces using Moment glue or sealant.

The cord is connected to the network only through the power supply unit (inverter). Under no circumstances should the cord be connected directly to a home outlet or to any other network – this will disable it. There are inverters that run on batteries, from a car network or 220 V. An inverter designed for 12 or 24 volts is connected to a home outlet only through a step-down transformer or mains adapter.

The inverter is selected depending on:

• input voltage (in the case of facade lighting, it is 220 V);
• output voltage;
• frequency;
• total wire length (from 1 to 250 meters or more);
• functionality (needs constant light, flicker, fast or slow flashing).

For those who do not like to work with a soldering iron, cords are sold with a soldered connector for the inverter.

According to safety rules, all connections must be sealed with a heat-shrinkable plug..

In the video: installing plugs on a neon cord

LED or LED garlands

This is the most popular type of New Year’s illumination now. Garlands can be used to decorate walls, roofs, windows, stairs, paths, trees. Garlands of the following types are produced:

• linear;
• grid;
• curtain (options – fringe, icicles, stalactites).

In LED garlands, LEDs have replaced incandescent lamps. As a result, the products themselves have become more expensive, but the service life has increased, and energy consumption has decreased by an order of magnitude. In addition, LED strings do not heat up, are lightweight and give pure monochrome light. Unlike lamp ones, LED decorations do not have a series connection of the entire circuit – blocks of a small number of series-connected diodes are connected in parallel. In case of failure of one lamp, the product continues to work – this is convenient if you need to place it in a hard-to-reach place.

Important: for the street, you need to choose garlands with a degree of protection of at least IP65 (against water jets).

Installation and connection

Garlands are attached to trees with wire ties, to a building (facade or roof edging) – with special clamps on self-tapping screws or dowels.

The main thing you need to know when connecting a garland is what voltage the product is designed for.

Low-voltage garlands (12 or 24 V) are connected to the household power supply through step-down transformers. The transformer is selected according to the operating voltage and load power, it is recommended to choose a device with a certain power reserve (10-15%). The power of each garland is indicated in the passport. To choose the right transformer, you need to add the power of all the strings connected through it. For example, we have 20-lamp garlands of 2 W each and a 110 W transformer, which means that you can connect 50 garlands.

If the power of one transformer is not enough, the garlands are divided into groups and each is connected through a separate transformer. Low-voltage strings can be connected into a single structure using connectors. It is forbidden to solder wires for this purpose on your own, so as not to reduce electrical safety.

Garlands powered by a household network are much more dangerous, so they try to place them in places that are hard to reach for people. They do not need a power supply unit, the controller also plugs directly into the network. The LEDs in these products are connected in series, so you cannot cut the wire or increase the number of lamps. If you need to connect several garlands, a separate wire from the network leads to each.

LED duralight

This garland / neon cord hybrid was invented in China in the late 1980s. It is a PVC cord with LEDs sealed inside it. There are two types of duralight:

• flat or duraflex – ordinary tape;
• round – solid transparent tube.

In addition, there is a two-wire and three-wire version, the latter can be operated via a controller in a running fire mode..

Professional advertisers and designers now rarely use duralight because of its significant drawbacks: after installation, the cord has the peculiarity of being ugly stretched if it is not fixed in special guides. The brightness of the duralight is small, there are no special lighting effects (except for blinking). However, such an LED cord is a relatively cheap way to decorate the facade of a private house, and its installation is interesting and easy even for a beginner..

The product is delivered in coils and is cut independently into pieces of the required length – the places of possible cuts are marked right on it. The set includes an electric cord, connectors, a plug at the end and mounting clips, with which the duralight is attached to the wall. You will also need an adapter to convert the current to constant and a controller to control the operating modes..

Duralight connection to a 220 V network

1. A power cord (power cable) is attached to the end of the cut piece of duralight. Make sure that each contact is connected to the corresponding wire on the duralight.
2. An insulating plug is put on the other end of the duralight.
3. Duralight segments are connected to each other with a special coupling.

In the video: calculating the power of the controller and connecting the duralight

It is better to prepare illumination for the upcoming New Year in advance, before the onset of low temperatures. Agree that working in the cold is not so pleasant, besides, the plastic properties of PVC are lost – in the cold, a neon cord, duralight and garlands begin to bend badly.