One thing that's very different about pixels compared to traditional Christmas lights is how you attach them to your house.  While regular Christmas lights usually are just kept on their wires and get super-tangled from year-to-year, we have some other common ways of mounting pixels that make setup and tear down a LOT easier.

To keep everyone happy you also want to consider making the setup and tear down as easy as possible without leaving any traces or marks on the house. Today, I am going to share some simple tips on what I had used this year for mounting pixels to the house.

The Basics of Setting Up

After some trial and error, I was able to find some ways to easily set up lights on the house. To get started, I began with the top of the house and worked my way down.

At the top, I used Wired Watts pixels that I ordered from WiredWatts.com. What I liked about these is I was able to set these up to be more permanent and use throughout the year. It was actually very easy to do and while this particular solution isn't on the market anymore, there are MANY options today.

So far these are still working very well and they are still attached to the house. If done correctly, they won’t be very visible and nobody will notice unless the lights are in use.

Using PVC Clips

As most would, you’re probably looking for a temporary set up and for this, I have a couple of different methods. For the outline of the house and windows, I like to take advantage of the vertical and horizontal spaces.

When working with vertical I like to use the regular Boscoyo Strips because they are easy to set up with and they are great when storing out of season.

Not only are these strips great for storage, but they also work great when you want to keep your lights straight with columns, windows, and outlines.

To mount these to the house I used just PVC Clips that you can get from online retailers such as HolidayCoro.com.

What these clips do is whether you’re working with conduit or PVC pipe, it allows you to just snap-in your light set up.

Setting up the lights in PVC pipe or conduit may take some time beforehand but once you have them set up you can simply attach it to the house. Then, when you need to take your lights down, you can just snap them off and store them.

This past year with everything set up, it only took us 90 minutes to take down all of the lights. The lights that took the longest were actually the conventional lights.

Another tip is keeping everything standardized if you can. I tried to keep everything at 8-foot lengths when I could. This meant I only needed 3 PVC clips to mount the lights to the house.

Using Bungee Balls

On the areas where I didn’t need to use PVC or conduit, I had found a couple of neat tricks to mount the lights.

To help mount just the strips, I had used 3-inch coated screws to help stretch the strips and use them on the garage or carport part of the house. But instead of using zip ties, I found these Bungee Balls on Amazon that worked really well.

You can set up the strips, and a couple of inches below use a screw or eyelet to connect the bungee ball to. This helps keep the tension on your light strip and keep it straight on the column.

By doing a simple bungee ball loop, you can add tension to the light strip and keep everything fairly straight and in place. Be sure to give it 2 – 3 inches of space so that it can tighten it up.

Working with Wires

Lastly, a piece of advice I wanted to share is to be considerate of when you working with wires. I had found that with standard bullet node pixels, you’ll be working with some extra wire slack. But the square type pixels don’t have as much wire to work with behind the pixel.

When you set up pixels that will bump up against the house, definitely consider working with the square pixels because they have less wire. This means that they won’t stick out as much when they’re set up against the house.

Try to use the standard pixels on areas that aren’t against the house so that the extra wire won’t be forced to stick out and have extra space behind them.