Common Questions People Ask About Our
Lauderdale Christmas Display
LauderdaleChristmas.com is located at 7706 NW 25 St., Margate, FL 33063

Q: When do you setup your display and how long does it take?
A: We usually setup the day before Thanksgiving and get the display 75% up by that Sunday. Then we spend the rest of the Advent calendar time incrementally adding lights to our display, at a rate of about 500 lights per day.

Q: How Many Lights are on your display?
A: As of 12/16/2007, we have about 46,500 Christmas lights on our display, and 100% of them are LED Christmas lights and LED rope lights. We do not have one single string of incandescent lighting on our display. Our "tune to" sign has LED rope light backlighting.

Q: How much does your utility bill go up?
A: Contrary to intuitive thinking, our bill does not increase very much. First of all, LED Christmas lights use only 20% of the power of regular incandescent lights. Also, with the Christmas lights synchronized to music through my lighting controllers, at any given time in the middle of a song half of my Christmas lights are off. So the net at the end of the evening, the average power is that of only half the lights! We expect our bill to go up no more than $100 over November.

Q: How do you get the lights to dance to the music?
A: We use 16-channel lighting controllers from Lightorama. For 2007 we used 7 controllers giving us 112 channels of lighting control for our Christmas lights. We read in a song off our CD collection and use the light sequencing software to create and orchestrate a sequence file similar to old player piano rolls for every song. I'm a conductor starting from scratch creating a symphony of lights. This is a painstaking process that takes 6 hours for every minute of music. One of my more complex sequences, David Foster's Carol Of The Bells, took me 30 hours over 5 days to create. The software allows me to simulate on the computer exactly what my lights will look like before I load the sequences into my lighting controllers out on my front yard. The 16 sequences I have so far are stored on a tiny SD card along with the MP3 audio files of each song. The main controller reads out the SD card and talks to all the other controllers, telling them every 1/10 of a second whether each light channel is on, off, twinkling, fading, etc. I also transmit the music to your car radio on FM 100.9 so that I don't need to use any loudspeakers and disturb my neighbors. The music sounds much better in stereo on your car radio. My display blends many technologies.

Q: How do you get the music to transmit to my car radio?
A: Inside the main lighting controller is an MP3 card playing the songs that my Christmas lights are sequenced to. That audio output is fed up to my roof where I have a Ramsey FM30 low power transmitter, which transmits the audio to your car radio on an unused FM station, in my case 100.9 FM. The FCC allows this as long as you transmit on an unused radio station. The transmitter works up to the stop sign 200 hundred feet up the street.

Q: What hours do you operate your display?
A: We run it from 5:30 PM until 10:30 PM. Few visitors drive by after 10 PM, so the timer cuts off at 10:30. On weekends, sometimes we leave it up another hour, but don't bank on it. If there is a light rain, we can still operate, but under heavy rain, the GFI circuits trip, so it's a crap shoot for you to drive over in the rain. You risk driving home empty handed!

Q: When will you take down your display?
A: We will probably run it though Jan 6, but not sure yet. We'll post on our home page the exact date as it draws near.

Q: Who does your donation boxes collect food and money for?
A: We are members of the First Presbyterian church of Coral Springs/Margate. We collect food and bring it to our church who supplies many local food banks. The 100% of the money goes to the church, where we have mercy ministries to help the poor, and we support 30+ missionaries throughout the world, some in very dangerous places. When you come please bring food and cash donations, and tell anyone whom you send here to do the same.