Although our bill does increase some, you my find it surprising that it really isn’t that much. Since our lights do so much flashing, fading and blinking the length of time that the lights are on is much less than if our display was static (lights on all the time).
On average, a song takes 17 to 20 hours to program. With each year we anticipate adding more lights and controls thus taking longer to program.
It’s hard to get an exact count but the 2008 show had just over 15,000 lights, the 2009 show had between 25,000 and 30,000 lights. In 2010 our light count was approximately 40,000. For 2011...it should be exciting. From there, who knows, the sky is the limit. Actually my wallet is.
In 2008 it took over 6000 feet of outdoor extension cord to keep all the lights on. That is over one mile. Wow!
That’s hard to predict but on average I have replaced approximately 100 bulbs each year.
We have purchased a computer program that allows us to upload music into a grid that we use to turn the lights on and off to the music. The computer is then connected to multiple control boxes that are responsible for turning the strands of lights on and off based on what the computer and our programming tells them to do.
Click here to learn why we do it.
Click here to learn how it works.
Our first two years we only used the music of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I found this to be the most enjoyable to sequence as I am more of a heavy guitar, rock-and- roll type. However, our third year was a bit different. I realized that my daughter enjoyed the more traditional music like Rudolph-The-Red-Nosed-Reindeer, Frosty…
I would expect this trend to continue as she participates more in the planning of our display.