Wind and Storm Damage to Holiday Lighting

Wind is what takes a holiday display apart. Not cold, not snow. Wind, and the ice that sometimes rides in with it.

Red Nose Lites has been installing Christmas lights around Nashville since 2006. Across 20 plus years of seasons, storm calls follow a pattern. The same few parts of a display come loose first, and the repair is usually smaller than it looks from the driveway.

A roofline is not evenly exposed

This is the part homeowners miss. Some stretches of a house sit in still air all winter. Others catch every gust that crosses the yard. Wind hits a house and has to go around it, and it speeds up at the corners and over the peak. The loads are not shared evenly, so the damage is not either.

Gable ends, corners and ridges

The clips on a gable rake, the last two feet before a corner, and anything sitting along a ridge carry more than the long flat run across the front of the house. When you see a sag after a windy night, look there first.

Anything not attached to the building

Wrapped trunks, lit shrubs, ground stakes, a wreath on a hook, inflatables. Trees move. A trunk wrap that was snug in November works itself loose by January because the tree has been swaying for six weeks. Ground stakes lift out of soft wet ground with almost no help. That is not a defect, it is what happens when you attach lights to something that will not hold still.

Long unsupported spans

Any run that crosses a gap is the weak link: porch to column, house to tree, across the top of a garage door. Nothing in the middle of a span holds it, so it whips, and that whipping is what pulls a clip off an edge or works a connection apart. If part of your display goes dark and the rest is fine, check the spans before you check the bulbs.

Ice is the load that actually matters here

Nashville does not usually get buried in snow. It gets ice. Freezing rain is harder on lighting than snow, because it does not blow off and it does not slide. It adds weight and stays.

The thing that fails is rarely the strand. It is whatever the strand is attached to. A gutter holding ice, especially one that still has wet fall leaves in it, sags away from the fascia, and lights clipped to that lip go with it. Out in the yard, ice loads limbs until they drop, and a limb coming down through a wrapped maple brings a strand to the ground still plugged in.

That is the argument for clearing gutters in November whether you are hanging lights or not. A packed gutter becomes a trough of ice hanging off your roof edge.

How lights are attached decides how bad it gets

Red Nose Lites uses clips sized to the roof edge or the gutter lip. Never staples, never nails, never screws into fascia, trim or shingles. That matters most in a storm, not on install day.

A clip that matches the edge it sits on spreads the load along the run. If a storm gets the better of it, what you get is a loose strand. Annoying, fixable, no damage behind it.

A staple or a nail holds tighter than the wire does. So when wind loads that run, the wire is the part that gives. Now you have a torn strand plus a hole in the fascia that takes on water every rain for years. Homeowners notice the dark lights in December. They notice the rotted trim later, in a much more expensive way.

The electrical side, after weather

Water finds connections. That is most of what goes wrong after a storm.

• If a breaker or GFCI tripped during the storm, something got wet. Reset it once. If it trips again, stop resetting it and find out why.
• Unplug at the outlet, not at the joint out in the yard. Never pull apart a connection you can see standing water in.
• Do not touch a strand lying in a gutter full of water until the power to that circuit is off.
• Get connections up off the ground. Water pools, freezes overnight, thaws in the afternoon and sits in the joint. A hook a few inches up solves it.

Walk the display after the storm passes

Do it in daylight, from the ground, before you touch anything.

• Look along every roof edge for a line that dips where the rest runs straight.
• Check the corners and gable ends specifically, not just the front of the house.
• Look for a strand hanging over a window or a door, which is a snag risk before it is a lighting problem.
• Check the ground under wrapped trees for fallen limbs sitting on wire.
• Note which sections are out, then look again after dark. Some things only look broken in daylight.

What is worth fixing yourself, and what is not

Plenty of storm cleanup is a ten minute job and nobody needs to be called. Pushing ground stakes back into softened soil, rehanging a wreath, reconnecting a joint once it has dried, resetting a timer that lost power. Do all of that.

What is not worth it is a ladder in December. The roof edge is exactly where wind damage shows up, and it is also the worst surface of the year. Asphalt shingles with morning frost behave like ice, and wet leaves in a valley are worse. Going up to reseat four clips is how a small problem becomes a serious one. A dark section of roofline is not an emergency.

How repairs work when a crew put the lights up

In season maintenance is part of every Red Nose Lites install, and there is a 24 hour service guarantee during the season. That exists for exactly this. Wind takes a run loose in the second week of December, somebody comes back and fixes it, and nobody ends up on a ladder in the dark.

The strands are custom cut commercial grade LED, so a damaged run gets matched rather than patched with whatever is on a shelf. Crews are insured. There are no contracts and no long term commitments, so the service is part of the job rather than something you buy separately after a storm. Takedown after the holidays and off season storage are included too, and the lights live with us in the off season rather than in your attic. More detail is on the how it works page, and the residential installation page covers a typical home job.

What to do before the next one

• Clear the gutters in the fall. It is the best thing you can do for a roofline display.
• Photograph the display on a night when it all works. After a storm you will not remember what was lit.
• Know which breaker feeds the exterior outlets before you need to know.
• Expect wrapped trees to need a check in January. They always do.

Getting a price

Quoting happens over the phone. Call (615) 595-9686, describe the house and what you want lit, and you can get a price on that call. If the property is large or unusual, or you would rather someone looked at it in person, a site visit is available. It is an option, not a requirement. There is also a quote form.

We work across Nashville and the surrounding area, including Brentwood and Franklin. Storefronts and office buildings have their own exposure problems, covered on the commercial installation page.

Storms will happen. A display put up with the right clips, on a clean gutter, with spans planned rather than improvised, comes through almost all of them.