C9, icicle or net lights: which shape to hang

Seasonal lighting is not really a product decision. It is a shape decision: the strands all plug into the same outlet and cost roughly the same order of afternoon, and what separates them is the shape they draw on the house.

There are four shapes worth knowing, and this catalogue carries a good example of the first three. Get the shape right and almost any strand of that shape will do. Get it wrong and the best strand of the wrong shape still looks wrong.

The four shapes

C9 is the big-bulb look — opaque retro bulbs about the size of a thumb, clipped in a row along the roof edge. It reads as a line of large, distinct, warm points from the street.

Icicle hangs short drops from the eave, so the roof edge grows a fringe. This is the shape most people picture when they say Christmas lights, and it is the only one of the four that reads as decoration from a hundred feet away whether it is lit or not.

Net is a mesh you throw over a bush. It is the only shape here that never touches the house — no ladder, no clips, no fascia — and it lights the shrubs under the front windows as shapes rather than as a wire wound through them.

Mini string is the dense line of small points: a tree, a railing, a porch post. On the roof edge it disappears into a thin bright line; wound round a trunk it is the only shape that works at all.

What each one is on this site

Eight inches is the classic C9 pitch and six is the standard icicle drop spacing, so those two numbers are the shapes rather than one manufacturer’s choice.

Colour, and which shapes can have it

This is the split that decides most of these purchases, and it does not follow the shape.

The C9 has an RGB chip in every bulb: warm white, red and green, orange and purple, anything, from a Bluetooth app. Bluetooth only — no schedule from the office, no voice control, you stand within range of the strand with your phone. Its warm white is an RGB mix rather than a dedicated white chip, so it reads a little pinker than a true 2700K.

The icicle and the net are warm white only. No colour, no app: eight modes on a button at the plug, and steady is one of them. The icicle’s button has a memory, so it comes back on in the mode you left it, which matters more than it sounds when the plug is behind a shrub.

If you want the icicle shape in red and green, nothing on this site does it. That is a gap in the catalogue and not a fact about icicles.

How many strands

Same measurement as a permanent run: the front eave plus both rakes of every gable you mean to light. The calculator gives you the number, and the measuring guide explains why the rakes are the part everyone forgets.

Then, because strands join end to end, buy one more than the arithmetic says.

• Icicle at 39 ft a string. A 40 ft front eave is one string. A front plus both rakes of a gable is two, joined. The listing says they connect.
• C9 at 99 ft a strand. One strand covers a front eave and both rakes of a gable, and it links to 300 bulbs — two strands — with the controller at the plug end of the first.
• Net by the bush, not by the foot. One panel covers a clipped shrub about four feet across; a hedge takes one panel per six feet. Panels connect end to end, and the cost climbs fast past two of them — at which point a string wound through the bush is cheaper.

What IP44 is not rated for

Every seasonal strand here that publishes a rating publishes IP44, and it is worth knowing exactly what that buys, because it is a real limit rather than a formality.

IP44 is rain from any direction. It is not a gutter, not standing water, not snowmelt running off a roof, and not the base of a tree in a puddle. An icicle string hangs from the fascia, which is where IP44 belongs; it does not go along the inside edge of the gutter. A net on a shrub is fine in rain and is not fine under a sprinkler head, which is the thing a net on a shrub is most likely to meet — site it away from irrigation or switch that zone off for the season.

The permanent kits on this site are IP67 or IP68, which is dust-tight and rated for immersion. That is not a fair comparison of quality; it is a comparison of what each thing is for. One lives above a gutter for a decade and the other lives on the fascia for six weeks.

The C9 is the exception, and not in a good way: its listing says waterproof and prints no IP number at all, so we print none. Treat it as rain-only like the rest.

What this catalogue does not carry

There is no C7 strand here. People shopping for the big-bulb look search for C7 and C9 together, and we have sourced only the C9 — so this guide has no count, no pitch and no rating for a C7, and it is not going to describe one from memory. When a C7 goes into the catalogue it will arrive with those three numbers like everything else, and this article will get a row.

We also carry no seasonal strand with a schedule or voice control. Nothing seasonal on this site has either. The permanent kits all do, which is one of the quieter arguments in the permanent versus seasonal comparison.

What we could not check

We have not hung any of these. Counts, pitches and ratings are from the listings on the dates printed on each product page, and the renders place lights by those numbers.

Two limits on the pictures specifically, because they are the reason people come to this site. The icicle render draws the top of each drop and not the drop itself — a line along the eave is the best a renderer built for eave lines can do for a fringe. And there is no render of the net at all: the renderer places lights on eaves, walls, walks and spans, and it has no bush, so we show nothing rather than draw a net along a pergola beam and put a count under it.

The record on the strings is long and the recurring complaints are specific rather than vague: a string arriving with a dead section, an individual bulb going dark while the rest run, the C9’s app losing the strand and needing a re-pair. On the net, which has a much thinner record behind it, the complaints are the mesh tangling in the box and a dead section on arrival. None of that is a whole-strand failure pattern, and on the strings there are enough owners that one would have surfaced.

Then look at it on a house

The shapes are easy to argue about and easy to settle: put them on the same house at the same dusk and the argument ends in about four seconds.

That is what the examples gallery is for, and the seasonal strands are rendered on the same sample houses as the permanent kits so you can see exactly what a season’s hardware gives up — start with the icicle on the two-storey. Everything for the season sits together in the Christmas hub, and the one strand here that does more than one season is covered in one strand for October and December.

Price tiers are our own rough budget bands, not live prices. Check the listing for today’s price.