Decorative and festive lighting
These are the products people buy for an occasion and then have to get up and install, usually the same afternoon. The guides here are about the two questions that decide whether it looks right: how much light you actually need, and how it holds where you put it.
What this group has in common is that the light is the decoration. Nobody is lighting a room to see by — the light itself is the thing being looked at, which means length, spacing and symmetry matter far more than lumens do. It also means the failure modes are visual rather than functional: a string that is a metre short, a panel wider than its window, a firework light whose arms have drooped.
Estimating quantity is where most of it goes wrong, and it goes wrong before anything is bought. So each guide starts with the arithmetic and only then covers the install.
Christmas and festive strings
How many Christmas lights does a tree need?
Bulb counts are the wrong unit — two strings with the same count can differ in length three times over. The arithmetic that works, why a spiral wrap and a branch-by-branch wrap differ by a factor of three, and what the pattern of a half-dark string tells you.
Curtain lights and light screens
These two look related on a shelf and behave nothing alike. A curtain light is decoration you size to a window; a light screen is a low-resolution display you size to what you intend to show on it. Read the curtain guide first if you are not sure which one you have — the variants are genuinely hard to tell apart from packaging.
Curtain lights: sizing, hanging, and which variant you have
Six curtain variants that look identical on the box, sorted along the three axes that actually differ. Matching a panel to a window, hanging it without wrecking the reveal, and why single panels can never be upgraded into a linked screen later.
Light screens: what a pixel curtain can actually display
The resolution arithmetic behind what your screen can show, the minimum distance at which an image resolves, how many characters of text fit, and how to configure a grid so patterns land the right way up.
Chaining several panels into one display
Data chains from panel to panel but power has to be fed into each one separately — and then the app needs telling the order and orientation you actually mounted them in. Includes a table for reading what a scrambled image is telling you.
Firework lights
Installing a firework LED light
Why the hub carries the load, how much wall you actually need, where the tail cable lands, and what changes when you put one outside.
Before you start
Most of this group runs on addressable strip or pixel strings, which means the control app has to match the controller inside the light. If yours will not connect, that is the first thing to check — see which app controls your light.
For anything involving a long run or several panels, the power side is covered in sizing the supply and fixing a dim far end.