LED lights make for easier outdoor holiday lighting

MOSES LAKE — You’ve got that holiday spirit and you want to deck your halls, light your eaves and brighten up your house and maybe even your yard this year.

Or, you want to up your holiday decorating game. Because the family down the street has a sweet display that has … inspired you.

According to Scott Bird, branch manager of Ewing Irrigation and Landscape in Pasco, it’s much easier to do now with LED lights.

“LED lights changes things big time,” Bird said. “They are virtually indestructible. We have some here we’ve been running 24/7, and we’ve not changed a bulb in four years.”

LED lights — light-emitting diodes, basically tiny silicon chips that glow when an electrical current is applied — use a lot less energy than incandescent bulbs, Bird said, and so you can plug a lot more lights into one outlet.

Still, it’s important not to overpower your electrical system, Bird said. A typical 2,000-square-foot house will only need about 300 lights for simple outdoor lighting, while a single power outlet will provide enough juice for a string of 500 lights.

Which means you can do all sorts of things you never considered, like wrapping trees and shrubs and even lighting walkways.

Billing itself as “the largest family owned irrigation and distribution company in the United States,” Ewing has 217 retail outlets across the United States, has regular online and in-person education programs for do-it-yourselfers, and has posted dozens of videos in English and Spanish on its YouTube channel and website giving instructions on everything from installing and adjusting automatic sprinklers to wrapping a tree in lights.

For example, when dealing with a long string of lights intended to wrap a tree, Roger Ramsey of Ewing Irrigation said in a short video that every string of lights should be unraveled, pulled taut to work out the kinks, and then rolled up into a ball to make the work easier.

It’s also best, Ramsey explained, when buying an outdoor LED light string to buy one with a rectifier that converts household alternating current to direct current to limit any possible damage AC current may do to LED lights.

Finally, Bird also said its fairly easy to buy strings of empty sockets and bulbs to go with them, making custom lighting arrangements easy.

“Everything’s really pretty customizable,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at [email protected].