Lighting 101
What is permanent exterior lighting, and what is actually on the house?
Permanent exterior lighting is a low-profile aluminum track mounted under your eaves, loaded with color-changing LED pixels, wired to a controller you run from your phone. It stays up all year, disappears by day, and lights the house on demand.
The one-sentence answer
Permanent exterior lighting is a fixed lighting system installed once along the roofline, soffits and trim of a building, controlled by an app, and left in place year-round. Nothing gets hung in November and nothing comes down in January. The hardware lives on the house and the look changes from your phone.
That is the whole idea. Instead of buying, hanging, fixing and storing string lights every winter, you install a system that already knows how to be Christmas, Halloween, July 4th and a plain warm-white porch glow on a Tuesday in March.
We install these systems out of Kittanning across Western Pennsylvania and into Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and New York. The product page at thraxel.com/permanent/ has the spec sheet. This post explains what the words on that sheet actually mean.
What is physically on your house
Three things. A color-matched aluminum track that sits tight against the fascia or trim. A run of RGBWW LED pixels inside that track, sealed in IP67 marine-grade silicone on 16-gauge wire. And a controller that takes commands from the Thraxel Lighting app and tells every pixel what to do.
The track is the part people worry about, and it is the part they stop noticing first. It is finished to match your trim color, so from the street in daylight you see a roofline, not a product. That is also why every HOA we have worked in has approved it.
The pixels are the part that does the work. RGBWW means red, green, blue and a dedicated warm-white diode. That fourth diode is why the warm white reads like a real 2700K bulb and not like three colors trying to fake it. Every pixel is individually addressable, which means each one can be a different color and each one can be diagnosed on its own if it ever fails.
- Track: color-matched aluminum, tucked to the fascia, effectively invisible by day
- Pixels: RGBWW, 16 million colors plus true 2700K warm white, individually addressable
- Housing: IP67 marine-grade silicone, salt-tested, on 16-gauge wire
- Control: Thraxel Lighting app, plus Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Control4
What it does that string lights cannot
A string of Christmas lights does one thing. A permanent system does whatever you tell it. Our app ships with scenes named Everyday Warm, Game Day, Christmas, July 4th and Halloween, along with Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. You can build your own on top of those, sync to music, or pick any of 16 million colors and leave it there.
The practical difference shows up on the calendar. In Western PA that means black and gold on a Steelers Sunday, orange and purple for trick-or-treat, red and green from Thanksgiving through the new year, and a soft warm white for the other 300 nights. One roofline, no ladders, no extension cords across the porch.
It also runs cheap. A typical 168-LED install running six hours a night uses about $52.80 in electricity per year, because each pixel draws roughly 0.3 watts. That figure surprises people who remember what incandescent C9 strings did to a December electric bill.
When permanent lighting is the wrong buy
It is not for everyone, and we would rather say so now than after the render. If you want the house lit for one month a year and nothing else, seasonal Christmas lighting is the cheaper way in, and our seasonal program at thraxel.com/christmas/ is full service from design to storage.
It is also the wrong time if you are about to replace the roof, fascia or siding. Track mounts to trim. Mounting it to trim you plan to tear off next spring wastes money. Finish the exterior work, then light it.
And if you specifically love the look of glass C9 bulbs, a pixel system gets close but is not the same thing. Some families in older river-town homes want that exact glow, and we will hang it for them every November without trying to talk them out of it.
Who buys it in Western Pennsylvania
The typical buyer is a homeowner who has hung lights for years and is done with the ladder, or a homeowner in an HOA neighborhood who wants lights without the approval fight. Brick colonials in Butler County, new construction in Cranberry Township, lake and river homes along the Allegheny. The product does not care about the style of house.
There is also a neighbor effect we track. On 11 of our last 14 residential permanent installs, at least one neighbor on the same street booked within 18 months. Once a street sees one clean roofline lit in warm white, the question changes from what is that to who did that.
Commercial buyers use the same system scaled up: restaurants, hotels, plazas, HOA entrances and rail-tourism operators. Same pixels, same track, more of it.
How to find out what it would look like on your house
Start with a free on-site consultation. We bring a tactical hard case with four live RGBWW strips totaling 128 LEDs, set it on your driveway and hand you the app. Within 48 hours you get a render mock-up of your actual house, not a template. Most homes install in one to two days and the app works from day one.
The system carries a 3-year parts warranty and 1 year on labor, and qualifying buyers can finance at 0% APR for up to 24 months. Request the consult at thraxel.com/quote/, or text Tyson directly at 724-859-4390. He runs every quote and every install himself.
