5 Advantages of LED Neon Rope Light Over Traditional Glass Neon

Lights have come a long way over the past 100 years. Now, decorative lighting designs can fit any vision.

Consumers find it difficult to make a choice between traditional and modern styles. When choosing lights for home decor, the options can easily overwhelm. Though trends go in and out on these sorts of things, the technology only expands.

To narrow things down, we’re going to recommend you design with LED neon rope light. These lights feature significant advantages over traditional glass neon.

Don’t just follow a trend, get out in front and know why you made your choice.

Neon Rope Light Advantages

Light emitting diodes (LED) have been around for nearly 40 years now. You see them popping up in more places every year. A recent development of LED tech introduced them for use as standard light fixture bulbs. These work by using dozens of smaller lights to create the desired brightness.

Engineers designed LED neon rope light configurations specifically to replace traditional glass neon. They took the energy efficient LED and strung them together in tubing that amplifies the light. This created a cheaper and more reliable alternative to glass neon.

LED replacements for many lighting applications continue to increase because, in the end, LED just works better. Let’s go over the advantages that LED specifically has over glass neon.

1. Flexibility

The clearest advantage of LED neon rope light systems comes from the flexible tubing that houses it. Glass neon requires tools and equipment to shape and therefore must be built by craftsmen or professionals.

Creating a design with LED rope only takes the imagination and will to do so. The material is lightweight and doesn’t heat up. Breaking an LED light rope takes a lot of effort and usually cutting tools.

The flexibility also aids when using a neon rope light for floor decorating. No need to fear stepping on the flexible plastic material — it won’t break.

They make great runners for stairs or along sharp corners because they can bend and contort to the desired shape. They can also add an additional buffer of protection against wear on the edges of steps or carpet thresholds.

2. Easy Installation

Installation procedures don’t require special teams either. No more dedicated wall space and a team to secure the sometimes heavy, and always fragile, glass neon. No more fear of broken glass spilling mercury or fluorite gas into the air.

While you can buy some pre-built kits which will include a neon rope light or two and some brackets, it is just as easy to do with basic tools.

Some zip ties and nails make almost any configuration of light possible, and they are easy to remove and reuse.

Glue, tape, or other adhesives can be used to hold the ropes in place, depending on the surface. Some rope light strips come with an adhesive layer ready to go.

Consumers sometimes worry about doubling up effects. These can occur when running rope lights around themselves to form letters or to cover larger areas. Doubling up on a neon rope light has a minimal effect in creating more brightness because the plastic housing also gets doubled.

3. Brighter

LED lights create more lumens per foot by nearly double. Some users appreciate that neon offers a more continuous light look, while LED has brighter and darker spots. However, from a distance and with newer housing, the light diffusion with LED excels across the board.

Up close, glass neon also features dark spots and bright spots as the gas inside excites unevenly. Mostly this is due to temperature and curvature changes in the glass which allow more or less gas inside the chamber.

LED neon rope light customers often look for softer glows that can be used as comfort or mood lighting. But other applications of LED, especially flashlights, show the superiority of LED bulbs.

4. Longer Life Span

As a solid-state semiconductor, LED uses less power to create the same lumens. This makes LED last longer because less wear occurs on each of the lights. The lights also share the workload over a larger surface area, so they shoulder less of the work.

Together these two features enable LED to glow brightly for upwards of three times longer than traditional glass neon.

Glass neon suffers from a multitude of problems for longevity. One comes from the fragile nature of glass. Also, neon works via exciting gasses in a tube.

The electrodes exciting the gas, depending on the shape, can be a long distance from the gas in the middle. To reach the middle of a shape may require more power to be pushed along to gain the same effective brightness. A lot of that power gets lost as waste heat at the tubes’ ends, which causes them to deteriorate more quickly.

5. Energy Efficiency

The same technology and features that create the longer lifespan for LED contribute to better energy efficiency. Less overall power requirement for the same brightness saves money. Not needing to replace lights also saves materials, which saves in manufacturing.

Heat loss concerns don’t pop up in LED neon rope light like they do in traditional glass neon. Glass neon also requires kilovolts of energy to power, which requires dedicated circuits the same as a cooking stove or clothes dryer.

Glass Neon Benefit

Glass neon does have one benefit over LED. Because LED works through semiconductor technology, it has a magnetic resonance. For a home which has family members using unshielded medical devices, like a pacemaker, this could pose a problem.

This health benefit of glass neon gets quickly outweighed, in most situations, by the presence of the heavy metals and toxic gasses used to make glass neon colors. But fair is fair, and a lack of electromagnetic resonance may be vital for some people.

More Lighting Ideas

If you need more ideas and tips about LED rope lights, we have a whole category about them on our blog.

You can find creative ways to use LED. Some tips on how best to mount lights. We even have more tech talk about how lights work and can work for you.

Looking to buy? We have neon rope lights and accessories ready to order. Come see what we can do for you.