Planning our first show for 2014

[KeysNole]

Greetings to all. I have decided to "make the jump" next year, and plan to purchase my first set of LED's and LOR controllers.

Below is a photo of my home and current setup. We outline the roof and ridge lines with C9's, then use incans to decorate the palm trees, bushes, etc.

 

 

Part of my battle will be that my home is wide and tall. I have a barrel tile roof that is extremely steep (we hold the C9's on with screws-each ridge tile has a hole on them).

We plan to have a 20' (or so) megatree on the left, where the reindeer currently are, or possibly up near where Santa's workshop currently is.

Arches will outline the driveway and island.

My questions are:

Would running lights vertically from the soffit to the ground (on the left where the large window is, toward the right where you see three windows, and across the garage) be recommended? We would consider the same along the roof, although going vertical or horizontal is still up for debate.

Would you recommend purchasing three different colors of lights in our first year? At this point we only have a desire for warm white, green, and red. Those lights would be in the megatree and wherever we decide to put them on the home.

Are there RGB setups that would benefit me? I think it would take a total of about 15,000+ lights to accomplish what we would like to do. Unfortunately it is basically 5,000 lights times each of the colors we want.

Although we love lights in numbers, we are not looking to have more than 16-32 channels.

I am not trying to duplicate the Callahan home seen below, but they are a bit of our inspiration. I believe they are running different light strands, as opposed to RGB.

 

Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Frankie
 

[dgrant]

You might want to think about RGB as a lot of people in here are starting to move to them. I myself, I'm ordering some now and hope I'll be able to figure it out but it allows you to create just about any color you wish on whole strings, under program control or if you went to smart(addressable) pixels, then you can get crazy wild with them. I've got about 15,000 LED's so this next year, I'll be using lots of LED's plus I bought more for whatever I can dream up. Now I've got 7 controllers, plus 2 30Amp controllers that I just acquired from a local seller who never got into it and I have one CCR. Speaking of CCR's those are addressable completely and they come with the power supplies and so on, all ready to run.

 

As for your house, it looks like you have plenty of things to work with. Possible firesticks, lots of capability for arches, roof lines, floods, props and you mentioned a megatree already. Its basically whatever you can dream up, you will make it happen. Your megatree...that requires advance thought and planning. 20 feet tall is a lot so you'll need to figure out how to erect it and how to keep it up safely. Getting lights on it will be the next task, AFTER you figure out how you are going to do them..straight down, spiraled and so on. Getting 20 feet up to hang lights on them will not be easy unless you rent a bucket truck or similar equipment. 

 

Start your plan now, which sounds like you are doing, then start acquisition of the needed items. Start sequencing right away as it'll take a long time to do that. BTW, firesticks, arches, megatrees...are all channel eaters so you'll need a lot more than you were considering, IF you elect to use them. The spring LOR sale is a good time to buy controllers.

[Premier]

Frankie:

 

If you haven't already got the LOR software, download it now before you buy. Up load a picture into visulizer and start drawing out your lights on the computer, that way you can program now, get the desired effects you want and you will know how many controllers you will need before you buy.