I had a conversation last fall that stuck with me. A guy in Chandler was asking about permanent trim, and partway through he said something like, well, that's a lot of money compared to just having somebody hang lights.
Fair enough. It is more money up front. But then I asked him how long he'd been paying a crew to do his lights every year, and he had to think about it. Turned out it was eleven years. He'd never once added it up.
So that's what this post is. Not a sales pitch exactly, just the arithmetic that almost nobody runs on themselves.
The number nobody tracks
Seasonal installation around the Valley generally runs somewhere in the range of $600 to $1,200 for a typical single-story home, depending on how much roofline you've got and whether you want the trees and the walkway done too. That covers the install, and usually the takedown in January, and it often includes the lights themselves as a rental.
Here's the thing about that number though. It's not a purchase. It's a subscription you re-up every November, and because it shows up once a year buried in the middle of holiday spending, it never really registers as a line item. It just feels like part of Christmas.
Run it out ten years at the low end and you're at six grand. At the higher end you're past twelve. And at the end of those ten years you own exactly nothing. Every January the lights come down and go back on somebody's truck.
What the other side of it looks like
Permanent trim is a one-time install. The channel goes up under your fascia, the bulbs are individual RGB LEDs rated for something like 50,000 hours, and the whole thing is built to sit out in Arizona weather year-round. There's no takedown. There's no January phone call. It's just part of your house now, the way your gutters are.
Depending on the size of the house and how much roofline we're covering, most installs land in a range where the crossover against seasonal service happens somewhere around year eight or nine. After that point you're simply not spending the money anymore, and everything past the crossover is money you would have handed to somebody else.
This doesn't work for everybody though and I'd rather just say so. If you think you might sell in the next couple of years, permanent trim probably isn't your move and I'd tell you to go hire a seasonal crew instead. It really only pulls ahead once you're staying put a while, which most of my customers in Gilbert and Queen Creek happen to be, though certainly not all of them.
The stuff that doesn't show up in the numbers
There's a whole category of value here that's hard to put a dollar figure on but that people bring up constantly after the fact.
You're not locked into the three-week install window anymore. If you want your lights on the night after Halloween, they're on. If you want them running through New Year's and then off, done, from your couch.
You also get the other 320 days of the year. This is the part people underestimate before they own it and then won't shut up about afterward. Warm white along the roofline on an ordinary Tuesday looks fantastic and reads as architectural rather than festive. Orange for Halloween, red white and blue in July, your team's colors when there's a game. One of my customers does purple for her daughter's birthday every year, which I thought was a little much until I saw it and it was great.
And nobody's on your roof. I've been doing this a long time and I've seen enough ladder injuries around the holidays to feel strongly about it. Even if you're hiring that out, that's a person on your roof every single year, twice.
Go run your own numbers
Honestly the ranges I gave you up there don't matter much, so use yours instead. Go pull up whatever you paid last season and multiply it by however many more years you figure you'll realistically be living in this house. That figure, the whole run of it rather than the single year, is what you'd actually be setting against the cost of an install.
Most people are a little surprised once they do that, and one or two have gotten kind of irritated with me for bringing it up in the first place, which I understand because nobody enjoys running that particular calculation on themselves. But the decision is sitting in front of you either way, and it seemed worth doing with real numbers instead of a gut feeling about which option sounds cheaper.
If you want, I'll do the math with you. I'm not going to talk you into permanent trim if the numbers say seasonal is right for your situation, because that's a bad way to run a business and I'd rather you trust me in five years when things have changed.
— Sam
Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. Licensed and bonded, ROC# 340142. Get in touch for a free after-dark design visit and we'll put real numbers to it.