Indoor smart lights are great, but outdoor smart lights really impress me. You can turn them on and off without braving the elements, and almost all outdoor lights now have color-shifting LEDs. You can change the color of the lights on the fly and create dynamic scenes, all at the touch of a button on your phone. Still, string lights tend to do poorly in weather, taking on water, burning out, and in my experience, not lasting more than a season or two. Professional versions of those same lights can be much hardier, but the price is prohibitive. The long-awaited Nanoleaf Outdoor String Lights (prices start at $99.99) promise to bridge that gap, making sturdy, smart outdoor strings possible for everyone.
I’m a big fan of string lights—but I’ve re-bought them frequently over the last 10 years because you have to keep replacing them. There’s a big difference between the cheap string lights that are attached to a standard, residential gauge power cord and string lights that use a commercial grade stringer with E26 bulbs with 55 lumens each. You’ve probably seen the latter on restaurant patios or other commercial spaces. While cheaper residential lights don’t really need additional support, commercial stringers generally use a support wire. You string a wire between your anchor points, and then hang the lights from the wire. Deck String Lights
Nanoleaf’s outdoor lights are a nice in-between. They look like commercial lights, and have the same heft and individual hanging posts at each light so you can hang them from a wire or just attach each to your home. They don't require the support wire, but they're heavy and need substantial anchors if you’re not using one. Strung on heavy-duty black wire, there’s a faceted E26 teardrop light every 24 inches. The drop lights themselves are substantial—they don’t look or feel like the thin globes most LEDs feature. Made of heavy-duty plastic, the facets make them look far more expensive than they actually are. They ship in foam, so it would be quite difficult for any of them to be broken in the shipping process. You can connect multiple strings, and they have a lead wire of six feet, with a small controller.
These lights are part of the Nanoleaf Matter line, and as such, they connected pretty easily. Once I plugged them into an outlet, the app found them quickly and then scanning the QR code on the controller paired them. From there, you add them to a "room." On the Nanoleaf app, rooms are a way of grouping lights so they can have the same effects, although this is also affected by what line of products they’re in. All Matter products tend to be able to have the same effects, and you can definitely use your new hanging string lights to pair with the Nanoleaf holiday lights I reviewed last year. Instead of simply turning these lights on and off, you can choose any of millions of colors, but you’re more likely to choose a color scheme. Since these are programmable LEDs, you can have the string shift from color to color, or have many colors at once, paired with motion. It sounds gauche, but the reason I like Nanoleaf is that the effect is usually subtle and beautiful, and the app preloads a number of tasteful ombré. You can download additional schemes from other users, or make your own, and it’s pretty easy to do so. Like all Nanoleaf products, these are also sound-responsive, meaning you can choose color schemes that sync to music. A complaint users have of the Nanoleaf app is that the products often go “offline” or can’t be accessed. While that’s absolutely true, I’ve found quitting the app and reopening it to be a workaround that fixes those problems most of the time. Another issue I have with the app: I’d usually like to have all my Nanoleaf items on the same motion/color scheme, but different product groups can only match with each other, something Nanoleaf has said they plan to remedy. This isn’t as big a deal outside—for now, it seems all outdoor products do group with each other.
I will admit, the design of the faceted bulbs didn’t appeal to me when the box arrived, and I don’t know that I’d have selected them on my own (Nanoleaf supplied these lights for review). However, once up, the facets won me over for a few reasons. First, they produced a light effect that felt new. Once lit, they have a crackled effect that was interesting. Once you layered color in, in softly shifting gradients, it cast a really beautiful light. Even on plain old cool white, the lights had a much more sophisticated look than average string lights. Color and motion shifts happened really softly and slowly.
My hope is that this is the beginning of more outdoor lights for Nanoleaf. I ended up hanging these like a chandelier under my patio, and am quite in love with the look. Granted, I haven’t taken these lights through a winter, and they’re only rated down to 5° F but they certainly look sturdier than any other lights I’ve purchased. You can purchase a base kit, with the controller, for $99.99 starting April 11, and extension kits are $69.99. Looking at commercial string light kits, this price feels competitive, and you get all the smart functionality, which in this case is a real win.
Amanda writes about smart home technology and gardening.
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