Sundays after dark
Black and gold on the roofline before kickoff, warm white by bedtime
Game Day is the scene people ask about first on a Western PA consult. Gold along the eaves, dark gaps between the segments so it reads black and gold from the street, and a tap in the app an hour before kickoff. This post covers how we build it and how to make gold look like gold.
What Game Day looks like on a roofline
Game Day ships as a named scene in the Thraxel Lighting app on every permanent install we do. The default is gold segments separated by unlit pixels along the full roofline, so the house reads black and gold from the sidewalk. Peaks get solid gold. Columns, if you have them, get gold too.
Some homeowners want it louder and add a slow gold chase around the eaves. Others want it quieter and run gold only on the front peaks. Either way it lives one tap away from Everyday Warm and one tap back. The hardware never changes. The spec is at thraxel.com/permanent/.
To be clear, we are a lighting company in Kittanning with no affiliation to any team or league. We install pixels in a region where the colors black and gold happen to matter a great deal, and we would be foolish not to make that scene good.
Making gold look like gold
Gold is not a diode. A pixel builds it from red and green, with a little of the warm-white channel to soften it, and the exact mix decides whether the roofline reads gold, amber or school-bus yellow. Too much green and it goes lemon. Too much red and it goes orange, which on a Sunday in Pittsburgh is the wrong message entirely.
We tune it on site during the final walkthrough, standing in the street, because siding color changes the result. Gold against dark gray or navy siding pops. Gold against cream siding needs a slightly deeper mix or it washes out. Brick sits in between.
Black is even simpler: it is the pixel off. That is why the gaps matter. A roofline of solid gold is a yellow house. A roofline of gold blocks with dark blocks between them is black and gold, and the unlit stretches are what sell it.
- Standard: four gold pixels, four dark, repeating, no motion
- Loud: gold chase moving toward the front door
- Subtle: gold on peaks and columns only, eaves dark
- Landscape: gold uplights on the front trees, roofline in warm white
Sundays, primetime and the rest of the week
The scene works hardest in the second half of the season. Early September games kick off in daylight, and the house is dark anyway. By late October a 1 p.m. game ends at dusk, and a Sunday night or Thursday night game runs entirely after dark. That is when a black and gold roofline earns its keep.
Most owners turn it on an hour before kickoff and leave it until they go to bed. A few leave it running from Friday evening through Sunday night as a weekend setting. There is no cost penalty for either. The whole system costs about $52.80 a year in electricity on a typical 168-LED install running six hours a night, and Game Day draws no more than warm white.
The playoffs are the bonus round. January in Western PA is cold, gray and dark by 5 p.m., and a gold roofline in the snow is a genuinely good-looking thing.
The whole street goes gold
Team color scenes are contagious in a way warm white is not. Warm white looks like the house came that way. Gold on a Sunday looks like a choice, and neighbors ask about it at the mailbox.
Our 2023 to 2025 residential project tracking shows that on 11 of the last 14 permanent installs, at least one neighbor on the same street booked within 18 months, and 58 percent of installs generated a neighbor inquiry. Those numbers are directional, not a promise, and a fair share of them started with someone asking about the gold. More on that at thraxel.com/blog/the-neighbor-effect-of-permanent-lighting/.
Pittsburgh's North Hills and the river suburbs are where we see it most. Our Pittsburgh page is at thraxel.com/areas/pittsburgh/.
Kickoff automation with Alexa, Google or HomeKit
The Thraxel system works with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Control4. That means Game Day can be a voice command from the couch, or a routine in your smart-home app that fires at a set time on Sunday afternoons.
A common setup: a routine that runs Game Day at 4 p.m. on Sundays from September through January and returns to Everyday Warm at 11 p.m. Set it once in August and never think about it again. If you would rather keep it manual, the app tap takes two seconds.
Control4 households can tie it to the same button that dims the family room and turns on the TV. That is the version that impresses guests.
The other five months
Football is a fall product. The permanent system is not. When the season ends the same pixels run red and green for Christmas, black and gold again for hockey and baseball, and 2700K warm white the rest of the time. Team scenes for the other Pittsburgh clubs and the college programs are covered in thraxel.com/blog/penguins-pirates-and-team-color-scenes/.
If you have been hanging gold rope light on the porch railing every September, this is the year to stop. Our consult is free, the render of your actual house comes back within 48 hours, and most homes are installed in one or two days.
Text Tyson at 724-859-4390 and tell him you want Game Day on the render. He will know what you mean.
