How long does it take us to put up our display?
4-5 days; assuming everything is working.

How long does it take to take down?
1-2 days.

How much wiring do we run?
~6,000 feet

How many lights do we have?
23,000+

Where do we store all of our Christmas displays?
Everything disassembles and goes up in the attic, on top of the garage shelves, or in the shed. We leave the penguins and most of the deer intact to take less time to put up the display the following year.

How do we run the shows?
We use Light-O-Rama controllers and software to run all of the lights. There are 4 controllers around the layout that have 16 channels each which gives us a total of 64 channels. We still have 3 channels we are not using.

How much power does it take to run our all of our lights?
Since we have converted almost everything to LED (the star on the big tree is still incandescent), the total power required to run everything is about 8.5 amps.

How long have we been doing this?
We started decorating in 1994; it was a couple of strands of C9 bulbs. The breaker would trip every time we opened the garage door or ran the dryer. Rudolph and Santa on the roof are the oldest decorations from 1995/96, and they have been restrung to LED so they are still going strong!

What items have we made ourselves?
❄ The orbs in the trees are made out of hamster balls and portions of LED light strands
❄ The Penguins are upside down tomato cages and the penguins and hats are all hand sewn
❄ The trees are combination of PVC, ABS drainpipe, and a sprinkler head
❄ The arches over the sidewalk are 20′, 3/4″ schedule 40 PVC and are held in place by 5′ electrical conduit on either side
❄ The arcs bordering the main yard are made of PEX pipe; we used nail polish remover to remove the lettering