Getting carried away with RGB holiday lights

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 05:37:10 +0000

What started as a small project quickly snowballed; taking way more time than anticipated, going through multiple scrapped plans and hardware changes, my fingers still hurting from making cables and pushing pixels through corrugated plastic. But for all the overkill, it does look pretty.

It started when I ordered two strands of Govee RGB patio lights offered as a Black Friday special. Installed them, and they seemed to work fine, until the next night, when the lights did not return to the previous state, just white. Our holiday light outlets are powered sunset to 11pm, and although the Govee app does have an option to remember the last state, it did not work when completely powering down, only when using the soft power button, fail.

MR16 12V Halogen to LED retrofit

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 21:25:14 +0000

[7 years later, see update at end of post]

This post is about my research into finding suitable MR16 LED’s for replacing the 50W recessed halogen lights in our house. In summary, I’ve found “ok” bulbs, not great bulbs, and you can read about the details below.

Our house is about 3 years old, new construction, and one of the many decisions we made during planning was recessed halogen vs. recessed LED lighting. At the time my calculations showed the additional cost for LED lights would only be recovered in electricity cost savings after about 12 years, not worth the cost at the time. Another problem was the optical quality of the products, the near halogen optical quality LED products were ridiculously expensive, and the mainstream LED’s were of poor optical quality, and had poor dimmability.

Led on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Getting carried away with RGB holiday lights

MR16 12V Halogen to LED retrofit