Are these lights an investment? They sure are! But I am telling you, they are 100% worth it!

Why did we buy them? Before we invested in these, putting up our holiday lights was always a dreaded task. We live in the midwest which means we were always balancing trying to get the lights up before it gets too cold and snowy and putting them out too early. Who wants holiday lights up in September? Then there’s the fact of having to take them down after the holidays… do we risk my husband sliding off the roof in the snow and ice or do we leave up until April? If your doing the math, that means our old lights could be up for half the year- no thank you! Enter Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights! I am telling you, these lights are absolutely the best!

* Installation could not have been more straight forward
* The connectivity to the app was easy
* The app is very user friendly and straight-forward
* We have had these lights up for two years and still going strong
* They can be used year-round
* Fantastic Customer service
* Year round use
* For us, they are also used for safety and security year round
* The combination of use options is vast
* The light strands virtually disappear on the house

Full transparency, we did have an issue with one of the strands malfunctioning about a year later. I called Govee explained what was happening, they asked my to send a video of it happening. They literally asked for nothing else and without hesitation, they sent me a new $250.00 strand of lights! AND, I had them by the end of that week!

I mentioned safety and security and year-round use in my review- allow me to explain. Our house does not have accent lighting built in to the soffits, so when our lights are not used for a festive reason (holidays, birthdays, etc.) we have them set as accent lighting. They illuminate the outside of our house in key places such a walkways, corners and the driveway. We love the fact they are on a timer that is controlled in the app. No more leaving the porch or garage lights on all day and night. We live in a neighborhood without street lights, it can get really dark! We no longer have to remember to turn on the outside lights if we have a visitor coming over. I can also go into the app and adjust the timer based on the time of the year. In the winter when it’s dark by 5:00 pm, my lights come on at 4:45. In the summer when it’s light until 9:30, I set the lights to come on at say 9:15. I do adjust the time a few times a year to keep up with daylight and darkness. It literally takes me less than 5 minutes in the app.

I could go on and on about what I love about these lights! As I said at the start of this review, yes these lights are a hefty investment, especially if you have a lot of roofline like we do, but I am telling you, these lights have been one of our best investments! Another factor that we considered when deciding to invest in the Govee lights was the amount of money we were spending on replacement lights after the weather had taken a toll on the strands year after year. Then there’s the fact we could never find the exact set we needed to replace a set, which would then ensue replacing many strands at a time. It was a never ending cycle of frustration. These lights put an end to all of that! Now, the only thing we have to think about it, what day do we want to open the app and click on our holiday lights! Which brings me to another point in the set up. You can get as creative as you want with them and create your own pattern of lighting, by selecting your own coloring, flashing or not, if you want flashing what flashing pattern do you want and etc. or you can choose from preset options. We do a combination of these options. For our year-round accent lighting we opted to create our own so that we could turn on white lights in the desired areas we needed accent lighting (which can be a set once and then just turned on and off- you do not have to re-create it each time you want to use it) For the holidays we select from one of the preset options- it just depends what look we are going for that year- maybe it’s a multicolored gingerbread look one year and then next year it might be a classic white light that is flashing. The options are vast!

Sure, there are all kinds of technical aspects that I could review, but if you want that information I would suggest you read the specs directly from Govee- they are the experts on that. I am here to tell you these lights are the real deal from an actual user! They are as great as advertised! Do not hesitate to add them to your home.

I’m impressed with the quality and construction of these lights. I feel they will last quite a long time outdoors. Mine are installed under the edge of the roof out of the sun and worst of the weather. The power supply/control unit is mounted indoors out of the weather. The pre-set factory “scenes” in the app are wonderful; you could use just the pre-sets and have tons of different light shows on hand. If you dig deeper into the app, virtually unlimited color choices can be had; you can program the “zones” of the lights, or each light individually, to a different color. The things you can program these lights for is limited only by your imagination. You can save a light set-up you make to saved scenes and recall it later. Spend some time with the app and it will start to make sense. I love these lights and the effects they can do. I can go to the preset “candlelight”, turn the intensity down and I have a warm white wash of light for security or just a really nice, non-holiday no-nonsense glow on the house. I have good connectivity from phone/app to the controller via bluetooth and can change settings from inside the house and the front yard. App setup is very easy and I’ve never had a problem connecting.
Installation: you will read this in some other reviews here and I’m going to repeat it to save you some heartache: before you get started, plan on buying additional mounting clips and screws. There are only enough clips and screws for every 4th light included with the kit. You can find clips very similar to these on Amazon with 1 screw holding the tab over the wire for a secure mount. I bought enough aftermarket clips of the same design to have one for every light on the string as I didn’t want to climb that ladder again to re-attach lights that had come un-stuck using the 3M tape only. Another bit of advice: toss the little screws that come with the light kit. They are small, are cheaply made, the Phillips heads strip easily and they do not self-tap easily. I threw all those little screws away and bought 1 inch self-tapping drywall screws that are much easier to get started as you work on a ladder while reaching up under the eaves of a house. Use one clip per light, use larger, better screws and your time on the ladder will be much more pleasant. Use a spacer to make sure the lights are mounted the SAME distance from your vertical wall. I used a piece of wood to make sure each light was stuck up exactly 1 inch from the vertical wall. The lights emit a cone of light downward and the edges of the cone are very sharp; if you randomly stick the lights up and don’t measure the distance from your vertical wall exactly, the cones of lights will be all different sizes and look a little wonky. I would buy these lights again with no hesitation. If you go with this set, buy extra clips and take your time with installation; you will have some really cool, professional looking lights that you can program to do tons of things.