A display that fails on December 18th and stays dark through Christmas is worse than no display at all. Every installation we do carries season-long coverage: if a section goes out, sags, or takes a hit from a storm, you call us and we come fix it. You do not get back on a ladder and you do not get a bill for the visit.
Charleston is a harder environment for an outdoor electrical installation than most of the country, and not for the reason people assume. It is not the cold. We barely get any.
Salt air. The peninsula, Sullivan's Island, Isle of Palms, and the Mount Pleasant waterfront all sit in a marine atmosphere, and airborne salt accelerates corrosion on exposed metal. Where that shows up on a light display is at the connections — the male-female plug junctions between strands, and the contact points inside sockets. Corroded contacts mean intermittent connections, and intermittent connections mean a section that works some nights and not others.
Humidity and winter rain. A wet December is normal here. Moisture works into plug junctions that were seated dry in November, and moisture in an exterior connection trips a GFCI. That is the system working correctly, but from the homeowner's side it just looks like the lights quit.
Wind. Coastal wind is steady rather than occasional. Clips that were snug on installation day work loose over six weeks of constant movement, and a strand that starts to sag pulls harder on the clips still holding, which is how one loose clip becomes a whole run hanging off the gutter.
None of this is avoidable. It is the cost of living somewhere this pretty. It is also exactly why we treat maintenance as part of the job rather than an upsell.
Nearly every service call we run is one of three things, and knowing which one you have tells you how serious it is.
Part of a strand is dark. This is a shunt failure inside a single bulb. LED strands are built in series segments with a bypass in each bulb, so the segment keeps working when a bulb burns out. When that bypass itself fails, everything downstream in the segment goes dark and the other segments stay lit. It looks alarming and it is the least serious of the three — one bulb, quick swap.
A whole section is dark. Almost always a tripped GFCI, almost always moisture in a plug junction. The fix is finding the wet connection, drying and re-seating it, and resetting the outlet. If it trips again the moment power returns, water is still sitting somewhere in the run and we keep looking rather than resetting repeatedly.
Something is sagging or hanging. Clip failure, usually after wind. This one we want to hear about immediately, because a hanging strand puts load on the clips beside it and a small sag becomes a large one fast. It is also the only one of the three with any real chance of damaging your gutters.
Being straight about the limits is more useful than a list of promises.
Lights we did not supply. If you own the strands and want us to service them, we will, but as a per-visit call rather than included coverage. We cannot warranty the lifespan of a strand that came out of someone's attic.
Damage from something hitting the house. A falling limb that takes out a run of gutter and the lights on it is a repair, not a service call. We will still come, and we will quote it before doing the work.
Design changes mid-season. Adding a wrapped tree in mid-December is a new installation, not maintenance. Happy to do it, just priced as the addition it is.
Interior electrical work. If the problem is a breaker panel or house wiring rather than the display, that is a licensed electrician's job and we will tell you plainly rather than poking at it.
On displays we install, season-long coverage is built into the installation price. There is no separate maintenance line item and no charge per visit between installation and takedown.
For displays installed by someone else, or homeowner-owned lights, we work per visit. What that runs depends on:
For context on the rest of the season: professional installation nationally runs about $5 to $12 per linear foot, and takedown separately runs roughly $100 to $400. Bundling installation, coverage, and takedown into one package is almost always cheaper than assembling the three piecemeal.
That is a shunt failure. LED strands are wired in series segments, and each bulb carries a small bypass so the rest of the segment keeps working if one bulb dies. When that bypass fails, everything downstream in the segment goes dark while the other segments stay lit. A single bulb causes it, and it is a five-minute fix once someone finds the right bulb.
That is usually a tripped GFCI outlet, not a light failure. Moisture in a connection trips the breaker, which is exactly what it is supposed to do. Once the connection dries out and gets re-seated, the outlet resets and the section comes back. If it trips again immediately, there is water sitting in a plug and it needs to be found.
Not usually. Almost everything we service is on the exterior, and we can diagnose and repair without anyone letting us in. The exception is when the fix involves an interior breaker panel or an outlet inside a garage, in which case we will arrange a time with you.
Season-long coverage is included on our installation packages. If we installed the display, service calls for outages, sagging, and storm-related repairs are part of the deal, not something you get billed for each time. We offer standalone service on displays we did not install, but priced per visit.