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Has anyone tried FireFly lights?


roknjohn

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12V 😀

(multiple of ) Those would easily be powered from a CMB24 port .3W each, 24 channels and a channel will easily support 36W 🤩

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  • 2 weeks later...
6 minutes ago, Sctiger said:

How do you like those lights Mr P? I've had my eye on them for a couple of years now.

 

I love them, this will be my 11th year using them and I have a large area to cover so it is much easier to use them rather then regular string lights. Regular string lights have the lights spaced four inches apart and the string is maybe 15' long. Lawn lights have lights spaced six feet apart and the strings are like 300' long. I have the originals since it was so long ago but they now have some that morph and twinkle

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I would assume the firefly lights would be dependent on the wind blowing to get the motion - something that during the evening we generally get absolutely zero.

Either one of those seems like too much trouble to pull up and re-install every week for lawn mowing (at least during the summer).

 

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I'm going to field 100 Peace stakes, this year and I'm hoping the grass will shutdown before I do. Right now i'm mowing every 5 or 6 days.

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This is southern California, so the grass grows all year, but far slower in the winter.  Ever since I started a light show in 2012, I mow just before I start setup in early November, and it does not get mowed again until after the show is off the lawn in mid January.  It's getting a little long by then, but not too bad.  This last year was an exception.  My lawnmower died over the winter, and by the time I got around to trying to get it fixed, COVID had all the shops closed, so it did not get mowed until late July.  It was 4 feet tall.

I am also planning on Peace stakes this year - if I get them sequenced...

 

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Down here in the south we have Bermuda grass which goes dormant and turns brown around mid November. I cut it short the first week of November and I am good until April as Bermuda doesn't grow until the temps are above 70.

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3 minutes ago, Mr. P said:

Down here in the south we have Bermuda grass which goes dormant and turns brown around mid November. I cut it short the first week of November and I am good until April as Bermuda doesn't grow until the temps are above 70.

I have zoizia it semi grows until Dec it would be to much work even for peace stakes although they would look nice to cover my area Id need 100's if not a thousand. 2 acre front yard wouldnt look good with only a section.

My grass guys get upset because at Halloween until after New Years they have to avoid 3' or more around my props.

JR

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On 8/28/2020 at 1:02 PM, dibblejr said:

I have zoizia it semi grows until Dec it would be to much work even for peace stakes although they would look nice to cover my area Id need 100's if not a thousand. 2 acre front yard wouldnt look good with only a section.

My grass guys get upset because at Halloween until after New Years they have to avoid 3' or more around my props.

JR

At least yours avoid your stuff!

  Where I live in a mobile home park, we pay a fee every month {no opting out, which I hate} for the "lawn service" they hire to do the LOUSY work they do.   And if you have decor out and don't put something around it {can't put up a fence which also is annoying at the holiday times} like big concrete blocks to keep them away and if you don't bury cords and cables, they'll just cut them and destroy lights, props, just downright careless bunch of morons.  Then the buffoons in management want to issue a "violation" to me because my yard has weeds growing up in it and they get irked when I say then QUIT CHARGING ME A MONTHLY FEE if YOU are going to write me a violation BECAUSE I DON'T GET DECENT LAWN SERVICE from the buffoons YOU HIRED!   Why am I paying for a service and then NOT getting it, why is it put on me to WEED WHACK and CUT the grass when that is what I am paying in my monthly rental fee, which also includes a trash fee, a garbage pick-up fee, and water and sewer fee.

I think I'm about to speak with an attorney about this because these buffoons they hire have cut light strands, power cords, destroyed a controller box {fortunately the electronics inside survived the box destruction}, broken props to no repair and cut up a strand of RGB bullet node lights.  Then you might get offered $20.00 for what they damaged, which doesn't cover any of the damages they did at all.

How I wish I never moved into this hell-hole I'm at now, and how I wish somehow, someway I could get out of it.  But I'm never that lucky, I'm stuck here until the place falls down around me and can't afford another and become homeless or die off, or if some relative leaves me their house when they pass on or enough cash top buy a decent, real brick and mortar home,{ but very doubtful of either these happening}, which ever comes first.

Well that's my blow off of steam and frustration for today. {There's a lot more, but I'm keeping this in the condensed version!}

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14 minutes ago, Orville said:

At least yours avoid your stuff!

OK, this is getting way off the original topic.  About 30 years ago I was renting the house on the left side of the photo.  It's a little hard to tell, but the next door neighbor's yard is three to four feet higher, and the property line was at the top of the slope between the lots.  We had a sprinkler line just on our side of the property line.  Because the dirt eroded, the corner of the sprinkler line ended up exposed.  Entertainingly, that pipe is still visible whenever Google Street View took this photo (the red arrow).  The neighbor's gardener kept hitting the exposed PVC pipe and breaking it.  After about the third time I fixed the broken pipe, I replaced about six feet of the pipe at the top of the slope and the four to five feet running down the slope with galvanized steel.  Just so happens that I was around next time the gardener mowed next door.  Sure enough, he hit the pipe.  Massive noise and the lawn mower quit.  This was followed by large amounts of loud swearing, and then the guy had to replace the blade on his lawn mower.

Guess what - he NEVER hit it again.

LasLomas_water-pipe.png

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As someone who mows lawns on the side, (about 16 a week) these kind of stories just get under my skin sometimes as they give us all a bad reputation.  It's not really that hard.  I don't claim to be the best in the world, but I make sure to do a good job, at least that's what my clients tell me, and I've never been fired for the work I do.  I mow lawns that have some Halloween décor out, and I just stay about a foot away, and if it's just a couple blow ups, I remove them, mow, and put them back (usually with prior permission).  Hitting them is just careless.  My question would be, how do your tree trunks look the rest of the time?  If they are hitting decorations, they are bound to be hitting other things as well.  How you can break sprinklers and claim to not know is beyond me.  There is a very distinctive feel and/or sound when you break one, which I've done, but always fix, or at least let the home owner know and I come back with the parts.  But listening to some of the stories also makes me laugh.  Jim's solution was just priceless. 

Back on topic, I bought some of the Firefly lights to try.  My wife thought they would look "cute" in our water feature during the summer at night.

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10 hours ago, Little_b said:

As someone who mows lawns on the side, (about 16 a week) these kind of stories just get under my skin sometimes as they give us all a bad reputation.  It's not really that hard.  I don't claim to be the best in the world, but I make sure to do a good job, at least that's what my clients tell me, and I've never been fired for the work I do.  I mow lawns that have some Halloween décor out, and I just stay about a foot away, and if it's just a couple blow ups, I remove them, mow, and put them back (usually with prior permission).  Hitting them is just careless.  My question would be, how do your tree trunks look the rest of the time?  If they are hitting decorations, they are bound to be hitting other things as well.  How you can break sprinklers and claim to not know is beyond me.  There is a very distinctive feel and/or sound when you break one, which I've done, but always fix, or at least let the home owner know and I come back with the parts.  But listening to some of the stories also makes me laugh.  Jim's solution was just priceless. 

Back on topic, I bought some of the Firefly lights to try.  My wife thought they would look "cute" in our water feature during the summer at night.

Yep, these guys give the good ones a bad rap.  I've seen the firefly lights in a few floral displays at some event I've been too, and they're nice, most of the ones I saw were either battery or solar powered, not something you can really use with any of the LOR Controllers {at least I wouldn't think so because of how they are made and work}.

But if I ever set up my pond basin again, was seriously looking at getting some to put around it, but then I always go back to thinking of the lawn service we have and I just shelve the idea all over again.   How I wish I could fix my yard up the way I'd like it to be, lots of beautiful flowers, fruit trees, flowering shrubs and bushes full of FireFly lights and my large pond with a nice waterfall rolling into it, along with my Garden railroad installed around and over the pond basin.  Just dreams for me.  

I'm lucky I even get a display up and not destroyed by these folks.   Had a Snowman I had a spot light on last year, I used him for my FM Tune to sign, they broke him and punched a few holes in him, ran over the spot light and destroyed it too.  It was just a cheap-o white L.E.D. I bought on clearance to light the snowman fixture so the Tune to info could be seen.   Had that snowman for a very long time, he would be well over 35 years old this year, but last year he met with his demise and the spot light that illuminated him.   It's disheartening and frustrating to try and find ways how to do my display and keep everything OFF the ground level, but even then things get broken.   The RGB bullet nodes were on a handicap ramp very close to the top, maybe about 1-inch under the handrail area on the outside, one of them managed to hit them with a weed whacker and just hacked them up.   I swear that had to be done on purpose, and when I asked for the cost of a replacement, they figured those lights couldn't have cost more than $10-$15 per strand.  So I lost a set of RGB bullet nodes and basically got nothing in return to replace them.  I showed them what they cost to replace, but they refused to believe that's what they cost at the time to replace {these are older 5V RGB LOR nodes}.

I'm close to the point of only having a display inside my house and nothing outside due to these lawn folk.   Just afraid it may be nothing more than another disaster in the works with these people.

I'd love to have a nice garden, FireFly lights {I like them from what I've seen}, pond,, streams, waterfalls and my garden railroad in a nice yard that I can find a decent crew to take care of since I can't really do that kind of thing much now.

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So a quick update-  I bought some of these from the original post, and the quality isn't there.  The wires that plug into the power pack don't fit to seal correctly and the bases aren't sealed.  There's no hole in the stake to let water through so over time, it will fill up where the wires all connect.  I know because it fell out just by me carrying it and the ends need a little more, let's say shrink tube, to seal the wire ends.  I set them up in the yard the other night and they are fun, but they do take a little stronger breeze to get them moving.

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14 hours ago, Little_b said:

So a quick update-  I bought some of these from the original post, and the quality isn't there.  The wires that plug into the power pack don't fit to seal correctly and the bases aren't sealed.  There's no hole in the stake to let water through so over time, it will fill up where the wires all connect.  I know because it fell out just by me carrying it and the ends need a little more, let's say shrink tube, to seal the wire ends.  I set them up in the yard the other night and they are fun, but they do take a little stronger breeze to get them moving.

I'm sorry to hear that.  But, I think you purchased from the wrong folks.   The Firefly Lights I was referring to in my reply are the ORIGINAL PATENTED Firefly lights that I saw working in some display settings at events I attended that were using them.   And they have a lot of good reviews on them.  That Dernon company you bought yours from may not be the "Original patented ones" that are found at this site: https://fireflymagic.com/

I looked at some of these at the events that had them both outdoor and inside set ups, and they{the outdoor ones} seemed to be very good, and looked to be waterproof as there connections looked just like the LOR RGB light connectors used on their outdoor RGB lighting and RGB controllers.   And they seemed to sway very easily in a light breeze.  So the Original Patented Firefly wires holding the LED bulb may be thinner than what you purchased.  

I could not find an actual manufacturer of the Firefly lights you purchased,  but I think you may have gotten a cheap knockoff of the only true Original and Patented version, which is usually always marketed under the name of "Firefly Magic".  And I didn't find that name listed or posted anywhere on the page you linked.

Edited by Orville
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