It’s usually right around Christmas time, as homeowners prepare to scale their frozen ladders and string colorful bulbs along their eaves, that the calls start flooding into Legacy Lighting.

The Lovell-based company offers permanent, customizable LED lights — an option that can become increasingly appealing as winter temperatures and ice settle into the Big Horn Basin.

“Everybody calls in a panic before Christmas, because they don’t want to put up Christmas lights,” said Legacy Lighting Manager Charlie Cooley. By that point, however, their installers are booked up. It’s better, Cooley says, to get in touch in the summer months, when the company is less swamped and when the weather is more conducive to installation.

Besides, the Gemstone Lights sold by Legacy Lighting can be used for more than holidays, such as to highlight architectural features. They’re also much more customizable than can lights, as the LEDs can be almost instantaneously adjusted to new colors and patterns, with thousands of options.

“There’s some people that [do] … different colors and different things that I maybe wouldn’t use, but that’s kind of the beauty of them,” Cooley said, adding, “it gives everyone the ability to do whatever they want with them.”

Legacy Lighting was formed by the Bairco Construction team in 2021, after they saw a growing trend toward outdoor LED lighting and no one offering that kind of product in the area.

“... We started looking into it and went, ‘Maybe that’s something that we should do to kind of employ some people locally,’” Cooley said.

Over the past two years, Legacy Lighting has performed roughly 130 installations across the Basin, including in Lovell, Cowley, Powell and Cody. They use a mix of Bairco employees and contractors, with each worker trained and certified. It helps provide “filler” work for the construction company, Cooley said. The plan is to eventually expand into Billings and Laurel, Montana.

The challenge has not been a lack of interest in Gemstone’s products, Cooley said, but keeping up with demand amid a tight labor market that’s made it harder to find workers.

“Anywhere you go and install them … all the neighbors want it,” he said, “and it just tends to grow pretty rapidly and exponentially.”

Cooley said they did a lot of research before partnering with Gemstone Lights, being impressed with the quality, capabilities and features.

The quality does come with an expense: Installing the lights on the front of a typical house generally costs around $3,000, Cooley said; going all the way around a home can land in the $5,000 to $6,000 range.

Some of the company’s pricier jobs have ranged all the way up to 1,000 feet of lights, he said, and it generally takes at least 50 to 60 feet of lighting to justify the fixed costs. 

If someone is building a new home and considering exterior LEDs, it’s best to act while construction is underway.

“We can get in there and do some pre-wiring and things like that,” Cooley said. “That just cleans it up and makes it a little easier to get in there and get going than after it’s all done.”

Gemstone’s system involves no visible wires and each track is custom built for each house; a color match gun helps ensure it’s the same shade as the home’s soffit.

“The whole idea is that when they’re off, you don’t see them at all,” Cooley said of the lights.

But when they’re on, they can be classy or flashy. Owners can pick when the lights turn on and adjust their brightness, color and motion — such as blinking or strobing — even down to the level of a specific section of lights.

The system’s controller integrates with Wi-Fi and can be adjusted with a phone app, Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Users can set up the system and forget about it or micromanage their home’s look.

“A lot of families … let the kids pick a different pattern every single day,” Cooley said, adding it can be fun to try different Christmas arrangements.

However, with demand for installations spiking in the September to December timeframe, Christmas isn’t the best time to explore lighting options. Some folks have called Legacy Lighting too late to get an installation before the holiday season, then waited and called the next December in the same panic, Cooley said. “And you’re like, well, we kind of tried to tell you: Call us in the summer ...’”

For more information, visit www.legacy-lit.com.