Do you want to make your country house festive and the yard romantic in the evening? Then decorate the yard with garlands. However, the choice of excellent lights is not so easy, they are presented in a huge assortment in stores, but you should not grab the first ones you like. Garlands should be not only beautiful, but also safe, as well as suitable for street lighting. These are LED garlands for the street.
Kinds
The street garland is hung outdoors, so it must be moisture-proof, otherwise problems cannot be avoided. All the types listed below have special protection against water ingress, which will prevent light bulbs from burning out and electrical shorting.
Universal linear
This is an ordinary wire with small light bulbs placed on it in a certain sequence (however, they can be quite large). The universal linear LED garland for the street is an analogue of the usual version of festive lighting for the home.
On the packaging of the linear garland, you will see the inscription “String Light LED”.
Monochromatic or multi-colored LED bulbs are used. The length of the garland can be from 5 to 20 m. There are street garlands on sale that can be connected into one continuous long decoration so as not to be confused with a long wire, the manufacturers have come up with a very convenient way. When several garlands are connected, control will come from one controller.
Such street garlands are called universal because they can be used in many different ways: walls of buildings, fences, street poles. For example, special Clip Light LEDs will look great on tree trunks.
curtain
The LED garland is represented by a horizontal cable and wires with multi-colored or monochromatic lamps depart from it down. Thus, we get as if it is a glowing curtain. The classic width of the “curtain” is 2 m, and the length of the wire with the bulbs is 1.9-9 m. This gives a huge range for design solutions, for example, such a garland can be hung on the entire blank wall of the house. Like the decorations of the previous type, curtains can be connected. You can make one large flashing decoration from no more than 10 ordinary garlands of this type.
Especially beautiful and unusual are the garlands, in which the lighting of the bulbs is sequential from top to bottom, which creates the effect of water drops. Such lamps were called light rain or waterfall.
The Delux company created garlands called Bunch, they are arranged in such a way that a different number of vertical wires can be connected separately to one horizontal cable. And instead of light bulbs, LEDs are placed on these wires, as if collected in bundles, resembling large snowflakes.
Curtain garland is used to decorate store windows and shopping centers, walls of buildings, and windows.
Fringe
Another name is a mini-curtain, as such garlands are very similar to the previous version. Their main difference is that here the wires coming from the cable have different lengths. Due to this, the garland looks very unusual, it can have a completely different look. Its other name is Icicl e Light LED.
The length of vertical threads can be from 0.2 m to 1 m. There are both single-colored and multi-colored. In some models, the controller allows the lights to “run” along the garland, flash, “fall” down, due to which incredible beauty is achieved.
Garlands, called fringes, can also be connected into a continuous structure, one such structure can consist of a maximum of 20 garlands.
Net
This option of street lighting is a grid of wires, at the intersection of which LED bulbs are located. These nets can be used to make a very large glowing decoration, as up to 20 nets can be connected to one solid structure. These garlands are extremely convenient to use to decorate the roofs of buildings or large shop windows.
Duralite
This type of festive lighting is actually glowing wires. They are often wrapped around trees in the city. Inside these wires is a chain of LEDs of the same or different colors. Wires with a diameter of 13-16 mm are used to create such garlands. The distance between the internal bulbs can be from 1.25 mm to 2.77 cm. Duralite – garlands, better than all others, are protected from moisture, so you can often find them in the city. Due to the fact that Duralite is flexible, different figures are made from them, which look very beautiful and festive. Such garlands are used for both external and internal lighting.
LED sculptures
Today these sculptures are very popular. It is a three-dimensional image of animals, angels, plants or any other figures, created from LED bulbs. To create such beauty, a special frame is used, which is densely covered with LEDs. During the day, these sculptures look like creations made of ice, and at night they turn into magical New Year’s decorations of the city.
Specifications
Why should you pay attention to LED garlands for the street? Let’s consider the main parameters that give them an advantage over competitive analogues:
- LED lamps last 4-5 times longer than incandescent lamps.
- LEDs are well protected from mechanical damage, nothing will happen to such a garland if it falls. Garlands are also frost-resistant.
- The light emitted by LED bulbs is brighter. Due to the fact that the incandescent lamps in Bels-Light garlands are larger, their brightness is also good.
- LED garlands are lighter than their counterparts. This allows you to hang many more lights in one place (for example, a Christmas tree or a tree branch in the yard).
- Due to the fact that in LED garlands, the light bulbs are not turned on in series, but in parallel, so if one of the LEDs fails, all the others will work.
- If for indoor garlands, as a rule, they consist of standard small-sized LEDs, then in street decorations there are light bulbs in the form of cones, snowflakes and other figures, it is great to decorate various objects with such garlands.
As for the degree of protection of the garland, according to the standard it should not be lower than IP44, here the first number indicates protection against the penetration of a part with a size of 1 mm or more, and the second – insulation against the ingress of moisture. Ideally, you should choose garlands with IP65 protection.
The insulation material should also not be neglected. The cheapest is PVC plastic, garlands with this insulation do not have the highest service life. The fact that PFH was used in the manufacture of the New Year’s street decoration can be found out by the V mark on the packaging. It is better to give preference to garlands with rubber insulation, it is marked R (rubber) or N (neoprene).
Ways of feeding street garlands
The power of garlands for outdoor use mainly comes from the mains. A standard 220 V socket will be quite enough for the harmonious operation of the decoration.
And there are also LED garlands that are powered by the sun, so-called solar batteries are built into them. For example, Duralight, which we talked about above, has exactly this type of nutrition. After all, when trees are decorated in the city, it is almost impossible to connect wires from the network to them. The device can work up to 8 hours, after which it needs power from light. The installation of such garlands has a number of advantages, starting from easy installation and ending with a high level of security.