Loads of lighting choices await shoppers this season

An outdoor holiday lighting display you can use your phone to turn on and off and control color and effects? There’s an app for that – a few of them, even.

Go into a home improvement store and your head may spin from all the exterior seasonal lighting and decor choices before you. It used to be fairly simple: clear vs. multicolor. Blinking or not. Big bulbs or little. Then came wire frame reindeer and other sculptures, then inflatables. Dancing light shows synchronized to music upped the razzle-dazzle.

Now there are shelves chock-full of LED light systems operated through apps and remote controls. The bulbs can change color and be programmed to remain steadily on or follow various lighting sequences.

“It’s the thing selling really well this year, it’s hard to keep (supply) up with sales,” said Z. McKoy, department supervisor at the Home Depot store on Carpenter Road in Modesto, discussing the display of LED LightShow AppLights by Gemmy Industries.

A set of 24 C-9 size lights can be programmed with 140 effects, with names including Starry Night, Glimmer and Sparkle. Preset color combinations are meant to make the lights suitable for other holidays, like Halloween, July Fourth, Easter and Valentine’s Day.

Similar systems include the app-controlled iTwinkle by GE and the remote-controlled Santa’s Best, which offers 47 color combinations using eight colors, plus nine lighting sequences.

Also popular this year are the ShootingStar lights by LED LightShow, McKoy said. Each icicle-shaped ShootingStar bulb creates an effect of falling light. The same effect is created by other ShootingStar products, like multicolored pathway light stakes.

“Everything LED” is selling well, he said. “We’re doing a rebate where they can bring in their old incandescent lights and get a coupon toward LED lights, and a lot of people are taking advantage of that.”

Over at Lowe’s on Pelandale Avenue, projection lighting and ShootingStar have been hot sellers, said Christine Lawson, outdoor power equipment specialist with Lowe’s.

The store couldn’t keep in stock the LED LightShow Projection single stake light in “icy blue,” she said. “You put it away from the house and it projects about a seven-foot diameter,” bathing the area in twinkling light, she said. The store still had smaller icy blue Projection lights in strings of eight.

“Everybody wants lights that can project on the wall because they don’t have to hang as many lights,” Lawson said. “… A lot of people also are going for LED rope lights to wrap around their columns. They get red and white so it looks like a candy cane.”

Harder to find in stores are strings of the classic incandescent bulbs, clear or multicolor. At Lowe’s, big, bright bulbs were on a low shelf, and the display was just a couple of boxes wide.

But for Tony Hamberg, who owns the Christmas Light Guy business, and his customers, those are the way to go.

Hamberg supplies strings of clear or multicolor, C9 or C7 size incandescent bulbs to customers, and he and his crew string them. Rarely, he’ll hang LED bulbs if a customer really wants them, but he finds that “once it’s up, they don’t like it because it’s not that warm, traditional Christmas feel” you get with incandescent bulbs.

“The white lights are almost dim, in my opinion,” he said. “What I hear is, ‘We like the blue, we like the red,’ but not the white because it’s not really white.”

A big reason people switch to LED, he said, is the energy savings. “But if you think about the cost and the time you’re running them all season, it’s not that long.” He sets his lights to timers, and most people have them run from 5 to 11 p.m. “From Thanksgiving to New Year’s, it’s really not that much on your (electrical) bill,” Hamberg said.

Folks also switch because LED bulbs don’t go out, and it’s frustrating when a tiny, push-in incandescent bulb burns out and makes half a string go dark, he said. But the bigger, screw-in bulbs don’t work that way. One bulb goes out, the rest stay on.

Hamberg has been in the Christmas lighting business for 19 years and serves the entire 209 area code. He declined to give a number of customers but said business has grown a lot over the years.

Clear bulbs are more popular than multicolor, he said, because they have a classic look and work better for other occasions. He just put up white lights at a customer’s home because she was hosting a wedding reception before Christmas and wanted the lights on for that event, too.

This week, Hamberg and crew were lighting some two-story homes in Del Rio. Sunday Carroll, a customer for eight years, was having multicolored lights put up. She has children ages 11 and 15. “One kid likes clear, the other kid likes color, so we take turns,” she said. The younger one is “winning out this year. I’m thinking we need to do that when he’s younger.”

A neighbor, Cathy DeLaMare, sticks with clear. “We’re very old-school, traditional,” said the four-year Christmas Light Guy customer. “My husband still has a flip phone, if that tells you anything.”

This story was originally published November 27, 2015 at 2:42 PM with the headline "Loads of lighting choices await shoppers this season."