The Pitfalls Of Modern LED Color Outdoor Lights

We've tried to improve and update our yard haunt lighting as technologies have changed since the late 90's. For many years we used standard colored PAR38 incandescent outdoor floodlights in our haunts. They had many drawbacks such as high electrical consumption, too hot to touch after being on for just a few minutes, easy to shatter the thin glass bulbs, had unpredictable longevity requiring plenty of spares, and tended to be too bright in many instances. In the early 2010's we made the switch to smaller incandescent color PAR20 50 watt landscape bulbs which had deeper color saturation and weren't too bright. The biggest drawbacks with those were having to have a slew of them in different colors along with the fun of having to manually change them out to get the lighting color scheme just right. Then in the mid to late 2010's came a myriad of affordable LED based color changeable outdoor lights. One LED floodlight could be any color in a rainbow of color choices. It could be dimmed or brightened to taste, used a fraction of the electricity incandescent lights used, and would last for decades worth of Halloweens. But as more and more options for these outdoor LED lights became available a new "nightmare" problem was encountered: device remote control cross-talk. In our 2021 haunt we had used a collection of several different brand LED outdoor color changeable flood lights we had acquired. This array of lights included a new fog machine which itself had integrated color changeable lights, a color changeable LED ripple effect light, and several different brand/style LED color changeable flood lights throughout the haunt. And that's when the nightmare began. Turning on the fog in the fog machine would turn off the ripple effect light. Turning the fog machine off via its remote? Well the ripple effect light still stayed off until you turned it on again with its own remote! Changing the color on one set of flood lights, changed the color of the fog machine lights. Changing the color on one set of flood lights could change the color on another set of lights (and not necessarily the same color). Turned out some remotes and devices were IR (infrared light) based, some were RF (radio frequency) based. The IR remote cross talk between devices could be at least be managed by very keeping the remote right next to the device you wanted to turn on/of or change the color on and far away from the other IR devices. The RF remotes were an insurmountable challenge because their signals carried far and wide. For our 2022 haunt we had to try to diffuse the situation by buying a different brand/model outdoor ripple light which also suffered from some remote cross talk issues with the color changing LED lights on the fog machine, but at least turning the fog machine on/off didn't turn this particular ripple effect light off. So for this year we bought a different fog machine with LED lights that has separate color light and fog remotes. We also purchased some different LED outdoor color changeable landscape flood lights lights. And there are still cross talk issues between remote commands. Fortunately a work around of managing the order of events in terms of which device's lights gets turned on when and setting colors on each device ahead of time individually was found (luckily the settings hold even after the power is turned off) and turning the fog on the new fog machine on and off doesn't affect the colors on these new landscape lights or turn them on or off. Unfortunately, the two different ripple effect lights we own are both affected by the remote for fog on/off on the new fog machine. There appears to be no standard for how the remote control commands are programmed for these devices, sometimes even within the same brand. So now we have to do extensive trial and error testing before hand to determine which light and effect combinations can be used together for each haunt and which ones have to be shelved. Ugh!