How to Compare Permanent Lighting Systems

Scroll any lighting company's gallery and you get the same picture: a roofline in red and green, shot at dusk, on a good-looking house. Every permanent system on the market can do that. Photos are a poor way to choose between them.

The real differences show up somewhere else. In what the house looks like at noon. In how the white light reads on an ordinary Tuesday in March. In one sentence on page two of the warranty. In who picks up the phone in year six. Those are the axes worth comparing, and they are the ones a quote sheet usually skips.

This is a buyer's guide, not a pitch. We install an RGBW system and we'll say so where it's relevant, but the questions below apply to every installer you talk to, us included. Take them to three quotes and compare like for like.

Ask what colors a system does and everyone says sixteen million. That number tells you almost nothing, because you will spend roughly eleven months a year on exactly one color: white. How a system makes white is the biggest quality difference between two rooflines that look identical in a color photo.

There are two ways to do it. An RGB system carries red, green and blue diodes and makes white by driving all three at once. An RGBW system adds a fourth diode that is actually white.

A permanent system is on your house every day of the year and lit for a few hours of it. Daytime appearance is most of the ownership experience, and it is decided by the track: the low-profile channel the LEDs sit in, fastened along the fascia under the gutter line.

Three things decide whether it disappears.

• Color match. Is the track finished to match your fascia and trim, or is there one generic color and you live with it? A matched track reads as trim from the street. An unmatched one draws a line across the front of the house.
• Profile. A slim channel tucked under the gutter line looks like part of the roof edge. A bulky housing standing proud of the board looks like equipment.
• Wire. Ask what the runs look like at gables, dormers and peaks. Transitions are where a sloppy install shows, and exposed cable is what people notice from the driveway.

While you're on the subject, ask what the track fastens to and whether anything goes through the shingles. It should mount to the fascia under the gutter line, roof surface untouched, and that answer matters again years later at a home inspection: how the track mounts without touching shingles.

The app is the part you touch every day, so spend real time on it before you buy. Two companies can install similar LEDs and hand you completely different experiences.

• Everyday use. How many taps to get warm white on and off? Are there zones or groups so you can light the roofline without lighting everything else?
• Scheduling. Dusk to dawn should be one setting. Ask how far ahead the calendar goes: a good system lets you set holidays once and forget them. Ours schedules up to a year ahead.
• Voice and smart home. Ask which assistants are supported and whether anything extra has to sit on your network.
• What happens when the internet drops. The question almost nobody asks. If schedules live only in the cloud, your lights go dark the night your router does. Ours run on the controller at the house, so schedules keep going through an outage; what you lose is remote control until the connection is back.
• Whose system is it. Confirm the app is set up on your phone, in your name, with a walkthrough before the crew leaves.

Warranty is where comparisons get slippery, because two numbers that look alike can cover completely different things. Get the document, read it, and keep it. A year count on a website is marketing until it is in writing.

• Product or labor. A product warranty covers hardware. A labor warranty covers somebody coming out to your house. They are not the same thing, and a long product term does not automatically include a truck. Ask which one you are being offered, in writing, before you decide.
• What a vague word means. If a term is open-ended, ask whose lifetime, which parts, and whether it transfers to a buyer. A plain number you can read beats a generous-sounding word you can't pin down.
• Who honors it. A warranty is worth whoever stands behind it. Ask what happens if the company that installed your lights is not around in year eight.

Ours, stated precisely so you can hold the next quote to the same standard: the lighting hardware carries a 15-year product warranty. That is a product warranty on the hardware, so ask us how service works at your quote and you will know exactly what to expect before you buy anything.

The hardware is half of what you are buying. The other half is the company. Quotes generally come from two directions: an owner-run local business, or a franchise or national operation working through a local branch.

• Owner-run and local. The person who quotes the job is usually the person who installs it and the person who answers later. Decisions get made in your driveway instead of escalated. The trade-off is scale: one company, one calendar.
• Franchise or national. You get a standardized process and often more crew capacity. The trade-off is that the branch, the crew and whoever answers the central number can change independently, so ask who you would actually be dealing with.

Neither is automatically the better buy. What decides it is the same either way: who physically does the work, whether they are insured, how quickly you get a human in year five, and whether the person in front of you can fix a problem without asking permission.

For the record, we are the owner-run kind, based in Wilmington and working the Triangle too. Calls and texts are answered 8am–10pm every day at (910) 910-4569.

If you do nothing else from this guide, do these three. See warm white on your own fascia after dark. Get the warranty in writing and read whether the word next to the number is product or labor. Ask what happens to your schedules when the internet drops.

Those three separate quotes faster than any spec sheet, and every honest installer can answer them on the spot. Ask us the same ones at your free quote and on-home demo, and hold our answers to the same standard as everyone else's.