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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

You can get led strips of lights designed for outdoors that when off are just a clearish rope.

Install those permanently and when they’re not on they’re basically invisible.

We tried that with some lights we in our bushes thinking it'd be fine to just keep them off, they're not even visible unless you were on our porch with your nose against the bushes looking for them. HOA ended up fining us anyways, nosy fucks.

>nosy fucks

Was probably your neighbor who ratted you out. I’m constantly reporting violations to our HOA

Highly probable, we have a bit of history with the neighbors a few doors down and would not surprise me one bit if they were snooping around the outside of my house for absolutely no good reason and got the random urge to nosefuck my bushes. They're certifiable and have nothing better to do all day.

Long ago I realized that the “cure” that is a HOA is way worse than the disease that is messy neighbors. And with what you save in hoa costs you can buy into a better neighborHood anyway.

I actually forgot to mention the funniest part of this story, so at first we only received a warning that we need to take the lights down and so we did immediately that same day. However, apparently they're so inconspicuous that they didn't realize we'd already taken them down and they went ahead and find us anyways two weeks later for not complying with the initial warning. Go figure.

The clear plastic in which they are housed (think rope light) will turn yellow and brittle after a season of sun. Places like Florida, might have to replace due to sun degradation.

You can get more expensive ones designed to last - but they’re nowhere near as cheap as the simple spools you find at Walmart etc.

As an added bonus, many have an array of color options, which makes it easy to change the lights to suit Halloween, Easter, Independence Day, or any other holiday you want your house to observe.

Individually addressable, waterproof LEDs are super cheap. Most expensive part is the power supply.

They also don't last outside long...

Eaten by squirrels... Tube gets full of water... As soon as one LED dies, all the rest start flickering like crazy....

You can get ones fully incased in silicone but that might not stop the squirrels...

If you're doing a new build are there products out there that are more nature-proof? (eg. like would be used in permanent commercial displays)? Or countersunk into solid material?

There are some with redundant data feeds.

It means any one LED can die, and the rest still work correctly.

If two LED's next to one another die, then the whole strip still fails, but obviously the chances of that are far lower.

When looking at them, each addressable LED has 6 pins not 4 if it's the redundant data feed type.

Yep, we “hung the lights” this year by simply changing the 2-digit light show code in a browser from Thanksgiving to Holidays.

Agreed. My wife's been buying these. We have two plugin type, and I think 4 solar type.

The solar type seem to only last a year or two, but really nice for wrapping far away bushes and such.

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