I did my holiday lighting with smart lights, and it was glorious

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Like most people, I’ve spent years after years buying lighting that doesn’t last longer than a year. With the advent of smart lights, I did manage to get some indoor lighting replaced with smart bulbs.

What I hadn’t tried yet was outdoor smart lights. I wanted to give it a go for this year’s holiday season, and it’s probably the best lighting choice I’ve made in a while.

This year, Govee sent over their Outdoors Christmas Lights Set, which is a nifty package that includes a bunch of their lighting products, which is also an excellent holiday gift.

While it took me some time to get everything installed, the end result was glorious. 

What you get in the Govee Christmas Lights Set

The Govee Christmas Lights Set is an assortment of lighting from Govee, which comes in two versions, indoors and outdoors. The outdoor set costs $459.99, but it is enough to have an all-out lighting setup for a house.

You get:

• Govee RGBIC LED Permanent Outdoor Lights 100ft (30m)
• Govee Christmas String Lights 66ft (20m)
• Govee Curtain Lights
• Govee Outdoor String Lights 15m (50ft)
• Govee Outdoor Light Show Box

The indoor set comes in cheaper at $189.99 and goes for as low as $139.99 during promotional periods, but you only get the Christmas string lights, curtain lights, and the light show box.

Putting up the holiday smart lights

The installation isn’t a straightforward process to begin with, mostly because the set has a bunch of products that need to be handled separately.

However, once you figure out what needs to go where, the whole process gets easier. You have instructions included with each product in the box.

The installations themselves are pretty simple. For the string lights, you don’t have any adhesives since they’re supposed to be, well, strung.

Our pine tree is a bit too tall, and in a rather cramped corner, so I chose to put the Christmas string lights along the railings of the second-floor porch of my house instead.

The outdoor string lights, on the other hand, looked better on the first-floor porch fence. These have a classic bulb-shaped casing, so they can look really nice if you get the installation right.

The permanent outdoor lights and the curtain lights both come with 3M VHB tape for fixtures. The adhesive is, without a doubt, the strongest I’ve seen, so you have to be sure about where you want these lights to go.

The permanent outdoor lights are not meant to be only a holiday lighting solution, as the name suggests. These are excellent to add some additional ambient lighting to your house.

You can always set them to warm or cool white on the daily and switch to a festive lighting scheme when needed.

The curtain lights are the best of the lot. I chose to install these on a small blank wall, making it a nice bright spot that can be customized.

You can take these down, but they also have 3M VHB tape fixtures to hang them from, which you’ll need to keep if you want to reinstall them in the same spot again.

How smart are these smart lights?

The physical installation of these lights took me about 2 hours altogether for my two-floor residence. Once done, I moved on to setting up the smart features.

The Govee app is the way to do this. You get a pretty simple user interface. What surprised me was how easy it was to add these lights to the app.

It’s a quick and easy process, where you select the kind of lights you’re looking to add, find the device in the list that appears, select your Wi-Fi connection, and done.

Some lights may need you to press the power button on the control boxes to help the app identify the lights. All in all, the process was simple and quick.

Once you’re done, you can do a lot more with these lights. 

To begin with, the curtain lights are like having an LED wall of your own. You can set a bunch of patterns from the Govee app.

All the lights have your standard smart light controls, including setting any color of your liking, brightness control, and different lighting patterns like breathing and cycling.

The fun part has to do with Govee’s sync, which works amazingly. I managed to sync all the lights together to keep a Christmas theme.

But there’s more! The last part of the set is the outdoor light show box. It lets you connect all the lights to its syncing function, and then you can just sync all of your lights to music.

I cannot stress enough how impressed I was with this feature. The box picks up the music you’re playing, and you can set the intensity with which the lights respond to the beat.

It was an excellent way to set up a lighting show. The overall effort was not all that much, barring some cable management, and it seemed almost unusual how easily the software put it all together.

Should you get smart lights for your holiday lighting?

At the end of the day, this set didn’t feel like overkill, which is a possibility with smart lights. The setup was clean, the quality is excellent, and the overall interoperability was great.

Also, the app features cater to both sorts of users — those who want to set up smart lights and forget them, and those that want to tinker with the settings frequently.

For those who want the less intense setup, the indoor set is excellent. But if you want an all-out setup that doesn’t look tacky, the outdoors set is the way to go. 

I’m sticking to smart lights for holiday decorations, and so should you. While smart lights struggled for a while, they’re now at a point where the effort is minimal, and the output is rather impressive.

Amazon also has the set delivering quite quickly if you’re a procrastinator looking for some last minute holiday decorations.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• This lifetime deal gets you 20TB of cloud storage for $99.99
• Govee holiday lights bring the party to your porch at 30% off
• Upgrade your creaky chair for a discounted AndaSeat gaming chair
• Walmart & Best Buy Xbox Series X deal selling out fast