String Lights (How much to buy)

I believe these are called bistro lights, but I could be wrong. We're having a company come in and hang them and then break them down afterwards. It's to light our outside gaming area.

For an area similar to yours, our lighting specialist recommended 400 feet of lights.

One box of our string lights from Target was 25ft long. I measured out the perimeter of where I was going to string them and bought enough boxes to cover. Total Distance/length per box = how many you need

I am watching this post I was wondering the same thing !!

^^Dido

@King is it cheaper to rent or buy the lights?

@rusticbride what kind of company did you call to hang them ?

I can give you the skinny on cafe lights.

We were going to order commercial grade cafe lights (each 48 foot strand containing 24 sockets was going to be $80 plus shipping). These are really almost 60 feet long but only 48 feet contains the sockets. For a 40x80 tent we were going to need 10 strands to effectively illuminate the tent. That might seem like a lot, but the bulbs are only 25 watt and we were going to illuminate the perimeter of the tent as well as up in the ceiling so it would not be like a cave.

BEWARE you CANNOT plug these in end to end like Christmas lights!!! They MUST be on their own outlets and you might want that outlet/box to be on a separate breaker because these SUCK ELECTRICITY like you would not believe. If we were going to use these we were going to have to use a generator because it would use too much electricity from the garage.

Some of these also DO NOT COME WITH BULBS. If you have to buy the vintage Edison bulbs, they are about $1 EACH....so you can rack up a pretty penny just in the bulbs. This is where we were going to order them from. http://www.save-on-crafts.com/lightstring.html

GraycatVintage... how is the lighting going? Are you all set, Any more words of wisdom!

@rusticbride which company did you use to hang the bistro lights?