Four Holiday Decorating Upgrades You Need This Season

Decorating your home for the holidays can be a fun and festive tradition. Making our homes shine brightly in the middle of long, dark nights is something many people look forward to, and some even look forward to making their displays brighter and more elaborate each year. And the best part: decorating is becoming even more affordable and reliable each year, thanks in large part to technological improvements and falling costs of upgrades. But what upgrades should you invest in? That depends on what it is you’re looking to do. However, we can strongly recommend a few quality upgrades that make your holiday decorating experience safer, easier, and more creative than ever before! Here are four of these upgrades:

Smart Timers

Automatic light timers themselves are not a new technology. In fact, they’ve been around for quite a while. Smart timers, however, are anything but your ordinary timer. These systems give you advanced capabilities and options while also remaining easy to use thanks to internet connectivity and intuitive user interfaces found in a smartphone app. Smart timers can come with a lot of different options—they can be programmed to turn on and off at different times throughout the week, they can be turned on and off with the touch of a button, and you can even set them to turn on and off when different conditions are met. For example, some people choose to keep their lights off until they are home from work, so they program their timer to turn on when they reach a certain distance away from their home. That way they come home to an enjoyable and beautiful home without wasting electricity.

LED Light Strands

LEDs are very much the future of lighting as we know it right now. Compared to their incandescent filament bulb predecessors, LED lights use only a tiny percentage of the energy, last considerably longer, run substantially cooler, and offer far more flexibility than other lights that came before. And they do all of this with technology that is falling so rapidly in price that it’s only a matter of time before an LED lightbulb costs about the same amount that an incandescent bulb used to (they’re already very close). LED holiday lights are exploding in popularity as well. Due to their increased longevity and low energy consumption, people everywhere are embracing these new forms of holiday lighting. However, LEDs also offer improved flexibility—addressable LEDs can change color based on input from a small controller, and some of these strands include a controller that allows you to change their color. By switching to LEDs, you’ll enjoy a home that twinkles like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Easy-Hang Light Clips

Many people use their old, trusty staple gun to put up their lights. While this might be a fast and seemingly easy way to hang lights, it’s a flawed system. Stapleguns can puncture the shielding on light strands, creating a short that could spark a fire. Likewise, the process of removing staples in order to take lights down is labor-intensive, and leaves permanent damage on your home’s roof or eaves. Fortunately, you don’t have to put up with this annual tussle with embedded staples anymore. Today, there are a variety of easy-hang light clips that easily and seamlessly mount light strands to the gutters, shingles, or eaves of your roof. They are extremely easy to install, extremely easy to remove, and stable enough to hold your lights securely in place through even some fairly harsh conditions.

Bubble-Style Outlet Covers

Sure this may not be exclusively a holiday decorating upgrade, but its value to your holiday decorating cannot be understated. Bubble covers are the latest and greatest form of protection for your outdoor electrical outlets, providing you with a safe and secure way of adequately protecting an outdoor outlet from moisture and the elements while also allowing you to keep something plugged in. Bubble covers have a small access hole at the bottom of the cover, allowing it to close completely but also preventing moisture from getting in thanks to gravity. They also provide a full seal over your outlet, keeping all moisture out, no matter how hard it rains. Happy Holidays from our family at Service Today to yours! Call us at (888) 998-2032 today to schedule an appointment if you need help with an electrical problem this holiday season.