LIFX Outdoor Permanent Lights review: Luxe lighting in the eaves

Putting holiday lights up on the roof is fun when you’re in that festive, pre-holiday mood. Taking them down in January? Well, that’s nobody’s idea of a good time. Permanent lights like these LIFX Outdoor Permanent Lights offer a good solution to this dilemma: Put them up once and you’re done forever. Well, maybe at least for a few years before something breaks.

This LIFX offering is a close companion to its string lights in that it plugs into standard wall power and works like any other light within the LIFX app. (LIFX’s path lights and spotlights are low-voltage products that require a different electrical configuration.) According to TechHive’s IP code guide, an IP66 weatherization rating means this lighting solution is impervious to dust and that it can can withstand a blast from a pressure washer from a reasonable distance. It draws 40 watts out of the box, but this will scale up or down with added or subtracted strands of lighting.

A 50-foot strand of LIFX’s Permanent Outdoor Lights produces 2700 lumens at maximum brightness–that’s a very strong 90 lumens per bulb.

Installation and setup

Like many string lights and permanent lights (including Govee’s, Enbrighten’s, and Home Depot’s Hampton Bay product), LIFX permanent lights come in pieces that you must assemble, which gives you a bit of flexibility when it comes to configuration. The power supply (a massive box that’s inline near the electrical plug) and a small controller comprise a “starter” unit that takes up about 7 feet of cable at the beginning of the run. You’ll need to plan to hide this hardware somewhere during your setup, though don’t worry about needing access to the controller—it doesn’t do much on its own except for a button that lets you reset the number of lights on the string.

Two strings of lights are included in the box, each 25 feet long, with each section containing 15 lights. (That’s about 20 inches between each bulb.) Two extra cables, each 10 feet long, can be used anywhere in this run to allow for house features you need to work around (like a chimney or windows), or simply to give you some extra length between the controller and the start of the lights.

Up to six additional sections of lighting can be added, taking the total length up to a maximum of 200 feet and 120 lights. LIFX, however, does not yet sell these lighting sections separately. You’ll need to buy additional starter kits if you want to keep adding strands. You can also make custom lengths, but this entails cutting cables, stripping the wires, and splicing on couplers (similar to Home Depot’s product).

Like Govee, LIFX gives you some flexibility when it comes to mounting your lights. Each light—a small puck that looks like a fat poker chip—comes with an adhesive backing that allows for quick attachment to the wall or roof. A single screw hole that’s part of each light’s plastic base is available to secure the light more permanently, and all needed hardware is included.

While Govee gives you two screws per light, the LIFX lights felt solidly attached to the wall with just the single screw, especially in conjunction with the adhesive backing. Enbrighten’s solution—a single screw in the center of a mount that becomes hidden when you pop in the lighting puck—remains the best approach we’ve seen on this score to date.

LIFX also provides several adhesive clips that can be used to keep wiring in place where you need it. While it’s a handy addition, these clips feel a bit flimsy, so I probably wouldn’t trust them to hold up over years in the elements. Simple nail-in cable staples or clips would likely be more effective in the long-term.

The full strand of lights produces 2700 lumens at maximum brightness, or 90 lumens per bulb, considerably brighter than Govee’s 40 lumens per bulb. A full range of colors is supported, of course, as is white light from a very warm 1500K to an icy 9000K.

Setting up the LIFX app

At the risk of stating the obvious, I highly advise configuring the lights with the LIFX app before you do the physical installation, not only to ensure the lights look the way you want them to, but because the setup process was particularly rocky for me.

The LIFX app is designed to detect new LIFX products when they’re powered up nearby and quickly onboard them to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, but I was promptly greeted with a “No devices found” error when attempting to connect to the permanent lights. Many vendors offer a workaround by letting you scan a QR code or manually select a product type you’re connecting, but even LIFX’s included Matter code didn’t work for me.

LIFX does offer one workaround, and that’s to turn the lights on, wait 15 minutes, and proceed to “Set up device manually,” which involves connecting to a temporary Wi-Fi network that eventually shows up, then using the LIFX app to bridge to your home Wi-Fi network. I’ve had this issue with other LIFX products in the past, but the permanent lights were particularly tenacious at preventing me from connecting to my home network. It took three attempts at resetting the lights and waiting 15 minutes for the timeout to arrive before I was finally greeted with a temporary Wi-Fi network to connect with.

After more than an hour of fiddling with them, I finally got the lights onboarded to the LIFX app—at least most of the way. Despite running through the entire setup process, the lights remained (and still remain) stuck in a section called “Finish Setup.” I’ve tried to finish the setup on a dozen occasions, but at the end, the app just spits me back out to the same home screen, with the lights stuck in this Finish Setup limbo.

The good news is that the lights are still functional in this state. The only restrictions are that I can’t give the lights a unique name or assign them to a room. I have not been able to connect the lights to third-party ecosystems via Matter or any other means, either. Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit are all explicitly supported—but none were working for me during this review.

Once installed, LIFX’s standard color controls are available, and you won’t find any surprises in the LIFX app on this front. A color wheel lets you choose from millions of colors while adjusting brightness with a slider, and LIFX’s “Triadic” color combination system is on tap if you want to let the app automatically select two complementary colors to go along with your primary color selection.

Should you buy LIFX Outdoor Permanent Lights?

True to claims, these trios generally look good, but note that the three colors alternate along the string of lights, rather than all three emitting from every bulb, which is the way LIFX’s string lights work. If you really want to drill down, you can paint each bulb’s color individually, but this is a surprisingly complex process to get right. LIFX’s app remains obtuse and in dire need of a redesign.

Better probably to let LIFX do the work: More than 100 preconfigured themes are on tap, built around holidays, music genres, famous artists, sports teams, and more—and each of these can be further enhanced with motion modes from sparkles to flame-like effects. A strobe light and two music visualizers are also available. Like most LIFX products, the lights look great no matter what colors you choose and are especially striking at night.

The downside is that the $199 asking price means the product is far from cheap, which is par for the course for LIFX. At press time, Govee’s 100-foot version (twice the length of LIFX) of its Permanent Outdoor Lights 2 are priced at a near-identical $200. It’s a tough comparison because LIFX’s bulbs are considerably brighter; on the other hand, Govee’s app didn’t give me nearly as many fits.

Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, PCWorld