Permanent lights, brightness and your neighbors

The short answer

Permanent lights that feel too bright are almost always set too bright, not built too bright. The same RGBW fixture that fills a December street with color can run as a soft warm outline on an ordinary Tuesday, and every control that decides which one you get lives on your phone: brightness, schedule, color and effects.

Most friction over roofline lighting comes from four habits. The level gets set for Christmas and never comes back down. The lights stay on after the whole street has gone to bed. A run of light faces a bedroom window a few yards away. Or a fast effect keeps going long after the party ended. Each takes a minute to fix.

We can tell you how to set lights considerately, not what your city's code requires. The last section shows where Birmingham and Sterling Heights publish theirs and how to find the same for your town.

Brightness is a dial, not a switch

Full output is the right setting on very few nights a year. It exists for a December house that should be seen from three driveways down. On a bare October evening, that same level can spill across the front lawn and into the living room across the street.

Your eye also misjudges the dial, and in your favor. Lutron's chart of measured against perceived light, drawn from the Illuminating Engineering Society's lighting handbook, shows a lamp dimmed to 10 percent of its measured output still looks like about 32 percent, because the pupil opens wider in low light. You can turn a roofline down much further than feels natural and the house still looks lit. Trust the curb over the number on the slider.

Here is where we would start for each kind of night:

Set each level after dark, standing at the curb in front of your own driveway. Then walk to the sidewalk in front of the nearest neighbor and look back at your house, then at theirs. If their siding or front windows are visibly lit by your eaves, you are too bright for a weeknight.

Off times that keep the peace

DarkSky International, the nonprofit that works on light pollution, puts the off time near the top of its holiday lighting tips. Lights burning all night with nobody outside to enjoy them do the most harm for the least pleasure, and a timer is the cheapest fix. A permanent system has that timer built in: on at dusk, off at the clock time you pick.

A sensible plan for the year looks like this:

1. Weeknights. Pick a time close to when the last car usually comes home on your street. We suggest 10 pm as a default and adjusting from there.
2. Weekends. An hour later is reasonable.
3. The big nights. Halloween, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July are nights the whole street stays up, and running late then surprises nobody.
4. Some nights, none at all. Outside the holidays, weekends only is a fine pattern.

The dusk start matters as much as the end. In Michigan, dusk arrives before dinner in December and long after it in July, so a fixed clock time is wrong most of the year. Our guide to smart roofline lights and their schedules explains how the start follows the sky while your off time stays put.

Side yards and close neighbors

Street-facing light is easy to manage, since the house opposite sits a full street away and a lower level usually settles it. The side yard is where trouble starts. On a two-story colonial, the side gable faces the neighbor's house head on, at second-story height, which is usually bedroom height.

That geometry is everywhere on the walkable blocks of Birmingham, where a roofline is seen from close range, and on the subdivision streets of Sterling Heights, where rows of colonials and split-levels share side yards. Plan around it before anything is mounted:

• Leave the side gables out. Many houses light only the street-facing roofline, which also costs less. See lighting only the front of the house for how that looks.
• End the run at the corner. The eave line can stop at the front corner instead of wrapping toward the back, which keeps light off the side windows entirely.
• Give the sides their own zone. Then they can stay dark on weeknights and join the front for December. Decide the zones at the estimate, before any channel is cut.
• Look from their side. Stand in the neighbor's line of sight one evening, or simply ask them to tell you if anything shines into a window. A two-minute talk in October beats a note in the mailbox in December.

Where the channel sits matters less than how it is set. A roofline you can see from the neighbor's window is a roofline that lights it, so the zone, level and off time above do the real work.

Effects: fine at 7pm, not at midnight

Motion draws the eye, which is the whole point at a Halloween party and the whole problem at 11:30 at night. Through a bedroom curtain, a moving pattern is much harder to ignore than a steady glow at the same level.

Fast flashing deserves extra care. The Epilepsy Society, a UK charity, says flashes between 3 and 30 times per second are the common rates that trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, though the range varies from person to person. It also notes that Christmas lights are not covered by the UK rules on flash rates. If a controller offers a hard strobe, leave it off, and choose slow fades and gentle twinkles instead.

A simple rule set works for most houses:

• Effects run early on the nights they suit, such as trick-or-treat hours or a New Year's Eve gathering.
• The house goes back to steady light well before your off time. Switch it from your phone, or ask at the estimate whether the schedule can change the look partway through an evening.
• Nothing fast ever faces a neighbor's window.

For October in particular, Halloween on permanent lights covers which effects read well from the street.

Dark-sky guidance

DarkSky International and the Illuminating Engineering Society jointly published five principles for responsible outdoor lighting. They translate cleanly to a permanent roofline:

1. Useful. Light only when someone will enjoy it. On a roofline, that is the off time and the nights you skip.
2. Targeted. Keep light on what you mean to show and inside your own property. DarkSky suggests placing holiday lights under the eaves so less light escapes sideways and upward. On a permanent roofline, the practical version is dropping side runs that face a neighbor and keeping the level low.
3. Low level. No brighter than needed. That is the brightness table above.
4. Controlled. Use timers so lights go off at a respectful hour. The dusk-to-off schedule handles it.
5. Warm colored. DarkSky notes that cool white and blue LEDs emit short-wavelength light that scatters easily into the night sky, and it recommends warm tones.

That last point is worth taking seriously on a house that runs lights year-round. Every LightCast diode includes a white channel, so warm white is always one tap away. Save cool white and icy blues for the nights you want them, and let warm white, or an amber tone, carry the late hours.

DarkSky also notes that owls depend on darkness to hunt and that light near wetlands can disorient migrating ducks and geese. Near Lake St. Clair, an earlier off time is a small favor to neighbors who do not live in houses.

None of this makes a fixture DarkSky approved, which is a separate program for products. It is simply how to run the lights you have.

Check your city's lighting code

Lighting rules live in city and township codes and differ from town to town. We point you to the text, because the wording and the scope matter.

Birmingham

The city posts its codes online and sends zoning questions to its Community Development Department. Its zoning chapter has a Lighting Standards section whose stated purpose is to minimize glare and light trespass. Read which districts it covers and how it treats holiday decorations and moving light, then ask Community Development how it applies to a single-family roofline.

Sterling Heights

Sterling Heights publishes its city code in an online code library, and its zoning chapter includes Section 24.06, Exterior Lighting Requirements. The city's Code Enforcement division handles property maintenance questions. Read the section, or call the city, before assuming it does or does not reach a single-family roofline.

Everywhere else

• Search your city or township name plus "city code", then look for sections on lighting, glare, light trespass or nuisance.
• Check both the general code and the zoning chapter. Lighting rules can sit in either, and your city or township building department can tell you which.
• If you live in a subdivision with an association, read its architectural guidelines too. Our guide to getting HOA approval for permanent lights walks through that review.

Once you know which sides of the house face close neighbors, you know which lines to light and which to leave dark. Take one photo from the street and the LightCast measuring tool prices the front roofline on its own, which is often the considerate layout anyway. A Birmingham walkable-street colonial with about 150 feet of front roofline runs $3,300–$5,100 once. Then request an estimate and mention in the notes which side faces a neighbor's windows, so the zones are planned around it from the start.

Where this applies

Typical roofline lengths and priced examples for these communities are on their own pages.

• Birmingham
• Sterling Heights

Sources

1. DarkSky International, DarkSky holiday lighting tips darksky.org
2. DarkSky International, Five Principles for Responsible Outdoor Lighting darksky.org
3. Lutron, Measured light vs. perceived light (after the IESNA Lighting Handbook, 9th ed.) assets.lutron.com
4. Epilepsy Society, Photosensitive epilepsy epilepsysociety.org.uk
5. City of Birmingham, Codes and ordinances bhamgov.org
6. City of Birmingham Zoning Ordinance, Lighting Standards (LT) online.encodeplus.com
7. City of Sterling Heights Zoning Ordinance, Section 24.06 Exterior Lighting Requirements codelibrary.amlegal.com
8. City of Sterling Heights, Code Enforcement sterlingheights.gov