Warm white or cool white: 2700K to 6500K on a house

Almost nobody buys a permanent kit for the colour. They buy it for the colour, run it warm white three hundred nights a year, and turn the colour on for two weeks in December and one in October. That makes the white the product and the colour the feature, which is the opposite of how the boxes are written.

So this article is about one number.

What the number is

Colour temperature is written in kelvin, and it runs backwards from how it sounds: the low numbers are the warm, orange ones and the high numbers are the cold, blue ones. These are the figures that actually appear in this catalogue, and there is no point discussing any others.

The gap that matters on a roofline is the one between 2700K and 4000K. It is not a large number and it is a very visible difference.

The two ways a kit makes white

A dedicated white channel. There is a separate white LED in each light, made to be white. 2700K out of one of these looks like an incandescent porch bulb.

Mixed white. There is no white LED. Red, green and blue are driven together to approximate one, and the approximation bottoms out around 4000K. That is a clean, slightly clinical white — closer to a security light than to a porch bulb — and on some hardware it reads faintly pink rather than neutral.

You cannot tell these apart from a product photograph. You can tell them apart instantly with the two side by side, which almost nobody ever sees, and you can tell them apart from the spec line, which is why the spec line is on every card on this site.

Which kits here do which

Two honest gaps in that table. We did not find a white-channel statement for the neon rope on any source we checked, so it is not in the table and we are not going to invent a row for it. And the Linkind’s range is what its listing says; unlike the others there is no second source behind it.

It is the same question on a patio, and it matters more

A roofline is something you look at. A patio string is something you sit under, and mixed white over a dinner table reads faintly pink in a way you cannot un-see once you have noticed it.

That is the whole argument for the S14 string, which carries a dedicated warm-white die in each bulb, over the cheaper H7015, which is the same length and the same fifteen bulbs and mixes its white. On an eave, thirty feet away and pointed at the sky, it is a difference. Three feet over a table it is the product.

And the strings with no radio in them at all — the addlon at 24 sockets, the Banord at a fixed 2700K, the Brightech sold in 2500K, 2700K or 3000K — have the number baked in at purchase. The Brightech is the only product in this catalogue that lets you choose your kelvin, and it is worth ten seconds of thought, because you cannot change it afterwards.

What it does on a wall

Here we have to be careful, because this is the part we cannot show you.

A wall is not a neutral card. Warm light on a warm-toned surface — red brick, terracotta, a sand-coloured render — lands on colours that are already in it, and the surface reads as itself but lit. Cool light on the same brick pushes towards grey. On a cold-toned surface, grey siding or white render, warm light warms the whole elevation and cool light reads as a floodlit car park. The spotlights hub puts the common landing point in one line: warm white on brick, colour for a week in October, is how most people end up using them.

That is reasoning, not measurement. We have not photographed any of these kits on real brick, real render or real siding, and the honest version of this section is: pick warm unless you have a reason, and be aware that the reason usually turns out to be that somebody saw a cool-white photograph on a listing.

The renders can only show you one of them

There is exactly one white scheme on this site, and it is warm white at 2700K. Every render you see here of a kit’s white is that.

This has a consequence we would rather state than have you discover. Where a product’s own white is cooler than 2700K, the picture flatters it — the Beau Jardin path light is cool white in white mode, and our render of it is not. Where a kit mixes its white and bottoms out at 4000K, the render is showing you the pitch and the placement faithfully and the colour temperature optimistically. Read the spec line beside the picture, not the picture, for this one number.

What we could not check

We have not mounted or hung any of the hardware named above. Every kelvin figure here comes from a manufacturer’s page or a listing on the date printed at the top of that product’s page, and a figure on a listing is a claim, not a measurement. Nobody has put a meter on any of these.

There is no CRI figure for most of the catalogue either. Two spotlights publish one — CRI 90 on the LEONLITE, CRI 80 on the DEWENWILS — and the permanent kits publish none that we found. CRI is how honestly a light renders the colours it falls on, and two lights at the same kelvin with different CRI do not look the same on brick. We cannot tell you where the eave kits sit on that, because nobody has said.

What to actually do

If warm white is the setting the kit will live on — and for most people it is — buy a kit with a dedicated white channel and stop reading. The difference is small on paper and it is the thing you will look at every night for years.

If colour is genuinely the point and white is an occasional setting, a mixed white at 4000K is a real saving on a real trade, and the Lights 2 exists for exactly that person. Side by side against the Pro.

Either way, look at the pitch and the placement lit before you spend anything: every kit here is rendered on the same sample houses. And if you have not measured yet, do that first — the warmest white in the world does not help a run that stops four feet short of the corner.

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