Hampton Bay Permanent String Lights review: The value leader

Given the hassle associated with decorating your home with holiday lighting, it’s no surprise that manufacturers are falling over themselves to offer smart—and permanent—solutions. Home Depot is the latest player in the game, with its Hampton Bay Permanent String Lights.

They’re a bargain at $99 for a 50-foot length, especially given how bright they are. Nevertheless, you should be prepared to accept some compromises in your pursuit of value.

Specs and details

The good news is that Home Depot uses RGBWIC LEDs in this product, as is the trend these days. That means each puck is outfitted with discrete red, blue, green, white, and warm-white diodes. What’s more, the manufacturer says the pucks can produce white light with up to 50 lumens of brightness (when producing white). That’s brighter than the Enbrighten Eternity Lights (33 lumens) and the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights 2 (40 lumens) we reviewed earlier. The lights have a white color temperature ranging from a very warm 2200 Kelvin to an icy 6500 K.

But the Hampton Bay lights are available only in 50-foot lengths (in white only), and there are only 30 pucks on a strand (spaced 19.7 inches apart). Both the Enbrighten and Govee products deliver 36 pucks on a strand, they’re available in 50- and 100-foot SKUs, and you can choose between white or black cables. Govee also offers a 150-foot strand. If you want more than 50 feet of Home Depot’s lights, you’ll need to wait until early December for its extension kits to arrive in stores.

When those kits arrive, you’ll be able to add up to three extensions at $29.97 each to add up to 50 more feet. If you need more than 100 feet of lights, you’ll need to buy another starter kit with a power supply. On the bright side, no pun intended, getting 100 feet of permanent string lights will cost less from Home Depot ($189.88) than either Enbrighten ($249.99) or Govee ($299.99).

The pucks in the Hampton Bay Permanent String Lights can produce white light with up to 50 lumens of brightness. That’s brighter than the competition.

On the other hand, while looking at Home Depot’s user manual, (yeah, I read those), I was surprised to see that the required tools include a wire stripper and a side cutter (aka diagonal cutting pliers, or as my dad used to call them, “dykes”). Fortunately, those tools are needed only if you want to shorten a light string, because you’ll need to splice either a female or male connector to the cut end (depending on which end of the string you cut). The manual goes so far as to include this caution statement: “Cutting and joining the wires should only be done by a qualified professional.”

As scary as that might sound, it’s an improvement over the Govee product, which you can’t cut at all. Shortening the Enbrighten product, meanwhile, is a simple matter of cutting it with a sharp tool and attaching a cap (you must leave at least four lights on the strand to shorten it, and the cut end can’t be left in standing water). On the downside, you can’t reconnect the cut end of Enbrighten lights.

The Hubspace lights connect to a smallish power brick and an inline remote control with buttons for on/off, dimming, and recalling lighting scenes. The remote has an integrated microphone, so you can synchronize your lighting to music or ambient sounds, although I can’t say I was overly impressed with this feature. It’s activated by pressing a Party Mode button in the app, but the resulting flashing and color changing didn’t seem to have much to do with the music I played—including the jangly Talking Heads hit “(Nothing But) Flowers.”

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting.

The power supply and the remote control carry a weatherization rating of IP65, which our IP code decoder article explains renders them impervious to dust ingress and able to withstand water jets from a spray nozzle (but not a power washer). The string lights themselves are more weather resistant, with an IP code of 67 indicating they can withstand immersion in up to 1 meter of water for 30 minutes. That’s more than enough to withstand any storm; just don’t leave the string in a gutter.

The light strings come in 16.4-inch segments (three in the starter kit) with DIN-style connectors (male at one end, female at the other). You also get a 9.8-foot extension cable, so you won’t be running LED strings up the wall from your outdoor outlet. There’s a captive screw-on protector for the end of the final string, and two extras are provided for the splicing components should you shorten the run.

Set up and installation

As with any outdoor lights, you’ll want to plug in the power supply and add the product to your Wi-Fi network (only 2.4GHz networks are supported) before you put them up. You don’t want to go through the trouble of installing the lights only to discover that they can’t reach your router. You can also fall back to Bluetooth control, although that’s not as practical. Be sure to plug the power supply into a weatherized outlet (it has two-prong plug on a 3.5-foot cable on one side). You’ll connect the remote control to the other side, and the extension cable to the remote.

The power brick and the remote have screw holes so you can secure them to the side of your house to keep them out of the dirt. Cable clips and screws are provided so you can secure the cables to the same, so they don’t flap in the wind or snag anything.

Home Depot, Govee, and Enbrighten all have the same good idea for installing the light pucks themselves: They use peel-and-stick pads to hold them into place until you can permanently secure them with screws. But Enbrighten has the best solution: They attach the pads to sockets, which you stick to the surface and then secure with a single screw. With the socket in place, you snap the light puck into the socket. Voilà! The screw is hidden from sight.

Home Depot puts the pads on the light pucks themselves, which you then permanently attach using two screws. Govee takes a similarly less-elegant—and more time-consuming—approach. Believe me, when you’re perched atop a 20-foot extension ladder (or higher, as the case may be), you’ll want to be down from there as soon as possible.

I did have one moment of panic once I’d hung all the first string of lights: I tested them beforehand, to rule out any problems, but I then disconnected them so I could install one strand at a time and not struggle with the full 50-foot length. I connected a second length and then decided to plug the lights in to see how they looked before I finished the third string. Well, the first string lit up, but not the second. Oh-oh, I thought to myself. A quick check of the Hubspace app provided relief: If you add or remove any lights, you need to unplug the power supply and plug it back in. This action causes the system to recalibrate its power output according to the length of the string.

Scheduling and programming

Once the installation is done, you’ll want to configure them using the Hubspace app (available for Android and iOS). You can give the lights a custom name and assign them to a virtual room in your home. This is the same app that Home Depot uses for all its smart home products. But when it comes to operating the lights on a schedule, and you have other Hubspace lights—we’ve reviewed the company’s Hampton Bay Landscape Spotlights and Hampton Bay Landscape Floodlight so far—you’ll need to create a schedule for each product individually. In other words, you can’t create a single schedule that controls all your Hubspace lights.

The scheduling restriction seemed like a drawback to me at first, but when I went through the process, I realized it’s a benefit because this enables you to program each light to turn on with specific presets: brightness, color or white color temperature, a lighting scene, or a lighting pattern (more on that in a bit).

You’ll find all the scheduling options you’d expect in a lighting application, including on at sunset and off at sunrise (including up to 4 hours before and after), including for specific days, for your specific location. You can also choose preset lighting scenes to turn on and off at chosen times. One feature the app does not support is geolocation, so you won’t be able to program the lights to turn on when you leave and off when you return.

With the app open to its home screen, you can turn the lights on and off with a touch of an icon, as well as adjust their color and brightness, but you’ll want to take full advantage of the many lighting scenes that are available, including ones geared to the seasons, holidays, moods, and more.

You can program up to three patterns, with each puck individually addressable in terms of color, white color temperature, brightness, gradient (a series of pucks start as one color and cycling to another on a color wheel), and effects (animated variations in motion and brightness). The one thing you might find confusing about this is that you need to ensure you deselect each puck after you’ve programmed it and before you move on to the next one or the next set; otherwise, your new choices will apply to all of them.

If you don’t have your phone handy, Hubspace products are also compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home, so you can use voice commands for basic functions (that, of course, requires the lights to be connected to your Wi-Fi network). And if you’re out of earshot of your smart speaker, you can also turn the lights on and off, brighten or dim them, or activate lighting scenes with buttons on the inline remote control. The lights are not Matter certified, however, nor are they compatible with the Apple Home ecosystem. For most people, and lots of Apple users, the former limitation will be less important than the latter.

Should you buy Hampton Bay Permanent String Lights?

Home Depot’s Hubspace line of smart home products deliver more features than you might expect to find for the price. While none of them have been exceptional compared to the competition, the Hampton Bay Permanent String Lights comes closest to being on par with the best products in their category.

The requirement to splice a connector to the end of a cut light string is one of the biggest differentiators, and it ends up being in Home Depot’s favor. The need for wire-cutting and splicing tools sounds intimidating—and it is—but it’s also entirely optional. You might not need to do it at all. When all is said and done on that score, Home Depot lets you re-use cut strings where Enbrighten and Govee don’t. That gives you a lot more flexibility.

On the other hand, some will find the Hampton Bay’s 100-foot limit to be a showstopper. While you can deploy multiple sets of transformers and lights and group them together in the Hubspace app, you’ll need an outdoor outlet for each transformer, and those might not be in locations that makes it simple to extend a run. You also can’t program two 100-foot runs as a single 200-foot run.

But the value proposition here bears repeating: A 50-foot run of these Hampton Bay lights costs $60 less than the same length of Enbrighten’s product, and $80 less than Govee’s offering. And you won’t need to give up much.