LED strip mounting ideas

[jmatlock]

I'm looking for ideas on how to mount LED strips temporarily for the season.  Winters get cold and snowy down to single digits at times.  My house is stucco with some relief areas near the bottom that break up the smooth line from top to bottom.  I've read about a lot of people mounting the strips to PVC pipe which provides an inexpensive backing.  I thought about ripping the PVC on my table saw to have a flat back against the house.  But I'm still not sure how to attach it to the stucco of the house without drilling into it and allowing moisture to get in.  we get a lot of icicles on the house as well from periodic freezing and thawing during the winter.  I'm sure many of you have even colder temperatures and have maybe figured this part out.

[vairmoose]

One simple idea is to screw a hook into eve above the place you want the strip to hang.   Attach the strip with fishing line and use Velcro patches to "attach" the strip to the wall.   This life of this method would be dependent on the humidity level  -  high humidity, not very long life.     

Larry

[arw01]

Post some photos of the house surface etc, it might give us some answers to work with for you too.  What material is your soffits?

How far off the ground you trying to go?  Any cement down there to work with?  Could you do rebar pounded into the ground to support some pvc pipe?

I did my house outline with ws2811 strips inside 3/4" white pex tubing.  For most of the house I slid light clips that are supposed to go under your shingles up under the laps of aluminum siding, held just lovely.

Alan

[jmatlock]

I did think about pounding some rebar into the ground for PVC support at the left side of the garage and i think that will work.  On the right side is a concrete sidewalk leaded to the front door so no dirt to work with for rebar.  I will post a picture shortly.  Much of the house is brick and if i can secure the bottom of the PVC then I could hot glue to attach to the brick.  Not sure i want to do with with the stucco parts.  There are two posts covered in stucco that i wanted to mounted a strip each to and the upstairs facade is also stucco.  There is also stucco around the base of the house that separates the main floor from the basement.  Those areas were my primary concern.  The soffits are wood beams clad in aluminum. 

Another concern I have is that it typically gets very windy before a storm passes through, usually in the 40mph-50mph range and we've had winds up to 75mph-80mph.  In the past I have mounted standard C6 lights with clips that I've slid under the aluminum flashing and it's held up fairly well.  But with the LED strips I'm a little more worried.  The PVC will add extra weight to the entire length.  I think I saw an example on this forum, somewhere, where these thin metal strips, not sure exactly what they were called since i just glanced through it, were bent into an S shape and used to hang the pvc from his gutters.  Maybe a similar approach could be used and slid under the shingles then tacked into place.

[jmatlock]

Here's a photo of the house with some comments regarding my current thoughts.  I welcome all comments and suggestions.

Thanks

[tbone321]

Perhaps you may want to edit the photo to show exactly where you want to place your lights.  In some areas it is clear but in others, I don't see where you want them to go.  Where you did show it (on the eves) I would personally go with the straight line along the top.  I think that it looks better and will be much easier to mount with far lass anchor points.

[jmatlock]

I agree that hanging them underneath will be more involved because you have to break the strand up but I think it would be more sturdy to hold the PCV pipe in place and if it is about 18 feet long in a straight line i have to break it up anyway unless I bought a strip long than 5 meters.  I need to take more measurements this weekend when I have a chance.  The under gutter and under eve's option could give me a lot of stability using PVC pipe along the roof line, especially in high wind conditions.

For the vertical section maybe the porch screen strips that another person mentioned here might be easier to fasten.  I'm just not sure how to do that with the stucco.  I don't want to drill it for anchors because moisture will get in and freeze during the winter.  Hot glue would be difficult to remove at the end of the season.  Unless I can fasten it to the eve's up top and the shingles at the bottom then use command strip tape to provide and adhesive backing for the duration of the season.  Assuming it will stand up to single digit temps.

because we routinely fluctuate above and below 32 degrees all winter I develop a lot of icicles along the second story from the from the upper roof until they actually touch the lower roof.  Mostly at the far right corner of that second story.

BTW, the roof line will be smart RGB LED, the vertical sections will be dumb RGB LED.

[tbone321]

I would not make a big issue about drilling anchors.  Stucco absorbs and releases humidity all of the time, just like concrete.  All you really need to do is shoot a little clear silicone caulk (the good stuff) into the hole before installing the anchor and that will keep the liquid water out and that it the real issue.  What I would do (and have done) is install stainless steel anchors in permanent positions.  I mount the upper anchor so that the pipe attaches directly to it.  I place the lower anchor about a half inch below the bottom of the pipe and use a zip tie to attach them.  This allows me to use the zip tie to apply tension to the pipe, keeing the wind from bouncing it around.

As for the smart strip dumb strip combination, I would rethink that.  I also remember you talking about using DMX type cntrollers and even there, that could cause some issues.  A DMX universe is only good for 512 channels and since a smart string or strip uses 3 channels per node, that means that 170 nodes will use up the entire universe.  If your smart strips habe a 3 inch node spacing, your run per DMX universe is around 42 feet in total length.  You may want to take a look at the controllers that we use here and there is a coop running for them now but it is close to its end.  We use a protocol called PixelNet that has a 4096 channel universe.

[jmatlock]

I'm going to use strips that are 3 nodes per pixel and I'm using E1.31 to drive my DMX over my home network with a pixlite 16 controller that will drive up to 16 DMX universes.  No worries about multiple dongles and a total of 8160 pixels per controller so I'm not worried about mixing the smart and dumb strings.  I think it will be fine for what I have planned.  The LOR controllers are also DMX compatible and I'm using one of those to drive some 120v lights.  That makes it easy to integrate into my network.

[FireMedic4Christ]

holidaycoro has a mount made for 1/2 pvc and an aluminum track with cover made for strips.


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[jmatlock]

Thanks, I have seen the aluminum strips and their PVC mounting kit and I've talked with them a bit.

After everyone's advice I have decided to go with all smart strips instead of a mix of smart and dumb.  It just makes more sense and the cost differential is negligible.  The PVC mounting seems the most cost effective.  Again, I thank everyone for the advice.

I do have a couple more questions though.  Since the purpose of the mounting system is to make it easier to put up and take down as well as store it I thought I'd ask how some of  you connect your strips together?  For me it makes sense to keep my PVC lengths to 6ft or so, then using couplings to put the lengths together for attaching to the home.  That leaves me with a couple of options, I think, for the led strips.  The first is that I join the lengths with an extended 4 wire strip soldered to each end that would allow for a few inches of separation to insert or remove the coupling and I just fold the pipes together for storage.  The second option I could think of was using the snap on strip connectors to join the strips together once I connected the pipes together with a coupling.  Has anyone used the strip connectors for either straight or corner connections?  Are they reliable enough to maintain contact in all seasons?

[arw01]

I think for the colums I would use the PVC pipe or other flat surface with a few felt stand offs hot glued to the back of what I was using.  Then hold that on with some long (like a roll type) of velcro, or baring that a long long ziptie.  Would leave no marks.

+1 on the putting some anchors SS type up at the top with some silicon to seal them up or a rubber washer bolt to go into the hole when it's not in use for blinkie.  you can spot paint them and never even notice them, but give you a real solid place to mount to the rest of the time.

I used hanger bolts in my soffit at first, then found cable mounts at HD that have a center screw hole and 4 slots I guess I would call them for a zip tie to come through.  I used those at 24" centers to hold my pex pipe on the soffit with a white zip tie and the WS2811 strips.

Longer term I would probably buy the aluminum strips from holiday coro , paint the aluminum the color of the sofit and permanently mount those, I like the ability to have accent lights the rest of the year for the holidays.

[FireMedic4Christ]

. . . .
Longer term I would probably buy the aluminum strips from holiday coro , paint the aluminum the color of the sofit and permanently mount those, I like the ability to have accent lights the rest of the year for the holidays.

I like this idea as well with smart strips this give you the ability to wash the house in color and have white spot lights in areas that may need it like the above the address numbers, near sidewalks, etc.

[jmatlock]

I saw the aluminum tracks at HolidayCoro a couple of weeks ago and I liked them but they are expensive, so that certainly would be a long term solution.  I also saw some at EntTec but they didn't have any prices and they seem to focus more on business solutions so they are probably a lot more expensive.  However, they really had a lot of different styles and options.

I do have aluminum soffits and fascia trim and I planned on mounting the lights underneath.  A lot of people in my neighborhood mount their normal lights underneath using the lip created as the fascia trim wraps underneath the soffit and it looks really good.  Permanently mounting the roof line is a nice idea.

[plaberge]

holidaycoro has a mount made for 1/2 pvc and an aluminum track with cover made for strips.

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I just got a bunch of the 1/2 in PVC mounts and started to install them today. Very slick! If you are looking for an easy way to mount lights under your eaves, you'll want to check these out. One caveat, if your soffits panels are aluminium or plastic, you'll need to be careful to mount them so the mounts screw into something solid.