The light bulb has long symbolized inventiveness and creativity but when it comes to innovation, light bulb technology itself has lagged far behind. In fact, up until a few years ago, the light bulbs illuminating your living room weren’t all that different from the ones that lit up your grandparents’ houses.
But all that is changing thanks to the increasingly widespread use of highly efficient LED string lights. LED lights provide bright, clean light in an easy-to-use format that makes them extremely flexible around the house. In fact, flexibility is one the biggest differences between LED string lights and their conventional counterparts.
LED lights are normally sold by the foot at big box hardware stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s. These strings consist of a durable plastic housing that covers rows of light emitting diodes (LEDs).
For the most part, LED string lights have been used in commercial applications, especially on commercial airliners. (You know how the flight attendant says to follow the lights on the floor in case of an emergency? Those are LED string lights she’s referring to.) You’ll also find red LED lights used to line the staircases in stadium seating movie theaters.
On the home front, more do-it-yourselfers are finding plenty of creative uses for this technology. Of course we’ve all seen plenty of LED Christmas lights powering elaborate holiday decorations on private residences. Holiday light aficionados value the bright light, flexible format and low energy output of these products.
If you’re feeling a little more creative, you can use LED lights to illuminate the dark corners of your unfinished basement and crawl space. Just measure off an amount that’s enough to line the floorboards and tack it down with nails. This little project will make your next journey to the basement to dig out Christmas decorations a lot easier.
But it’s not just the unused portions of your home that can benefit from some LED love. These easy-to-use lights can be tacked on the back of a home entertainment center to bring a little razzle-dazzle to a hum-drum cabinet. You might even consider putting them on the floor beneath the home entertainment cabinet. This makes accessing components like a DVD player a lot easier when you’ve got the lights off.
There’s hardly a limit to what homeowners can do with LED lights if they just apply a little imagination. And as an affordable, simple to install home remodeling project, they really can’t be beat.
