I have some incandescent rope light along the eaves of my house and along the deck railing. The light along the deck is failing and the light along the eaves will likely be pulled down during a residing project and I’m looking for something more economical to run and longer lasting.
Do LED rope lights have that horrible flicker LED Christmas lights do? Is there a more appropriate affordable product for outlining the eaves of a house? I’ve seen LED light strips, but they seem to be oriented to providing massive amounts of usable light, or else to be put inside channel letters. I want something about the brightness of the existing rope light, in amber or warm white. Color changing might be cool, but not necessary and I don’t want to pay for it if it’s a lot more expensive or use it if it’s less durable.
The LED ropes I’ve used don’t flicker, and I use about 5 or 6 of them in various places, but the longest rope I use is 18 feet. I don’t know if a longer run might act differently.
Do the rope lights you’re looking at have an external power supply box or not? If they don’t, they’ll flicker; if they do there’s a chance that they won’t flicker. Some models may have LEDs going in both directions or a full-bridge rectifier so that they flicker at 120 hz instead of 60, but good luck finding that printed on the box.
BTW, if you’re at all handy with electronics, you can easily add your own bridge rectifier and smoothing capacitor to reduce the flicker to something acceptable.
The run is over 100 feet, so I think I’m limited to something that can run off the AC line rather than 12 volts DC, I’ve seen both types of rope light.
If you want to indulge your artistic side, you might want to play around with electroluminescent wire. The biggest drawback right now is the relatively short life compared to more mature technology. 1600-5700 hrs depending on the frequency of the supply voltage.