Holiday Lights – LEDs Part 1
After we remodeled the house, we put up the old holiday lights that had been used at my parents. You can see them in the photo on the remodel pages.
But we were interested in having other options, like orange/purple for halloween, or pastels for spring. Programmable LEDs seemed to be the way to go.
After some research, we settled on the Alitove lights, which are available via lots of on-line retailers. We got the first set last year, and never did anything with them. Finally this year, we put them up and were able to program them with the free app they include, doing a red/green chase. Two strands were enough to do the front porch (about 20-21 linear feet).
the bundle of lights 
the standard power supply 
the end of the strand has two free wires
to attach to the power supply
the adaptor to connect to the app 
basic white during testing
We used zip/cable tie adhesive mounts with small/short cable ties to mount the lights on the inside of the eaves, so that the lights showed just below the edge.
lights from inside the porch 
lights as seen from the walkway
The real question was how many lights could be put onto a single power source before we saw fade. The Alitove website doesn’t really say (although they show some impressive displays); the Amazon website description says 3 or 4 strands. Each strand has extra wires for additional power — but what happens if you add power to the middle of a long strand? or do you need to have multiple controllers? (and how do you keep them in sync?) The controller we bought this year does not use the same app as the one we bought in 2018. Now what?