We Clean Your Roofline All Year. Hanging Lights Club Lights It, Halloween Through Valentine's Day

Short answer: the crew that cleans your gutters and windows also hangs your lights. Hanging Lights Club is the lighting side of the same business. Same owner, same trucks, same suburbs, same insurance. If you already have us on the calendar for a fall gutter clean, the lighting quote is a conversation, not a second vendor search.

This post is the plain version of what we install, what it costs and when to book it. No countdown timers, no "limited spots" pressure. Just the three ways to light a roofline and the honest difference between them.

The short version

• All-inclusive seasonal, from $799. Custom cut for your house, installed, timer set, maintained through the season, animal damage covered, taken down in January.
• Color-changing C9 seasonal, from $1,400 for an average house. One October install covers Halloween, Diwali, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas. We set the schedule so it recolors itself between holidays without you touching anything.
• Permanent roofline lighting, from about $3,000. Minleon track and diodes that stay up year round, run from your phone, and disappear in daylight. Ten years on parts.
• Patio, bistro, event and commercial lighting are separate from the roofline and quoted on their own.
• Book seasonal work in September. October fills first, and October is when it gets installed.

Why your window cleaner is the one telling you this

Most lighting companies see your roofline twice a year, in the dark, from a ladder, in November. We are on it in spring for gutters, in summer for windows and soft washing, and again in fall. That changes what we know about it.

Three things we see constantly that a lighting-only crew never gets to tell you:

Clips do not damage gutters, but bad clips on a bad gutter do. A properly seated C9 clip sits on the gutter lip and comes off clean. A clip forced onto a gutter that is already pulling away from the fascia, or one that has spent a season packed with wet leaves and ice, takes the lip with it in January. We know which gutters on your house are solid because we have had our hands in them.

Lights go on after the cleaning, not before. Black streaking on a roof, a green north face, a dirt line under the gutter: all of it is far more visible with a light strip running along it at night than it is at noon. If we are doing both, the wash goes first.

A roofline that is straight and clean lights better. This is not a sales line, it is geometry. Lights follow the gutter line. A sagging or debris-packed gutter puts a wave in the run, and once you see it at night you cannot unsee it.

Three ways to light a roofline

All three are quoted as a whole job. We do not price by the foot. What actually moves a quote is complexity, height and access: a simple two-story ranch line is not the same job as three peaks, a dormer and a section only reachable over a conservatory roof.

The seasonal price starts at $799 and up, depending on the complexity, height and access of the job.

The math on permanent versus seasonal

Permanent lighting is not a luxury purchase forever. It is a purchase that pays back, and how fast depends entirely on which seasonal tier you are comparing it against.

If you light for one holiday a year, permanent takes almost four years to catch up. If you light for several, it is closer to two. That is the honest version. Anyone who tells you permanent lighting pays for itself in two years without asking how many holidays you light is quoting the best case as if it were the only case.

What "all-inclusive" actually covers

The word gets used loosely in this trade, so here is the specific list for a seasonal install:

• Custom cut for your house. The strand is measured and cut to your roofline rather than pulled off a shelf in fixed lengths, so it fits your peaks and your runs instead of nearly fitting them.
• Professional install. Clips seated on the gutter lip or shingle line, runs pulled tight, cords routed out of sight, no staples into fascia.
• Timer set. Programmed to your schedule, not left on a photocell that fires at 3 p.m. in December.
• In-season maintenance. A bulb out, a run knocked loose by wind, a strand pulled down by ice: we come back and fix it. That is not a service call, it is part of the price.
• Animal damage covered. Squirrels chew cords. When it happens, the repair is covered rather than billed.
• Takedown in January. We pull everything down and haul it away. Nothing ends up in your garage rafters and nobody in your house is on a ladder in January.
• A fresh look next year if you want one. Plenty of customers change their color combination from one season to the next, and that is a normal request rather than a problem. Tell us in September what you want this year and we cut for that.

The thing to compare against is not another installer's headline price. It is whether their price includes coming back out in December.

About those 16 million colors

The permanent system and the color-changing C9 run RGBW diodes. Three color channels at 256 levels each is 256 x 256 x 256, which is 16,777,216 combinations. That is where the number comes from, and it is real arithmetic rather than marketing.

What matters more than the count:

The W is the point. RGB alone makes white by firing red, green and blue together, and it comes out cold and slightly blue. A separate warm white diode makes white that looks like the warm white bulbs on the rest of your street. This is the difference people actually notice from the sidewalk, and it is the reason a cheap RGB strip reads as a party light while this reads as house lighting.

Control from your phone. Colors, patterns, brightness, zones and schedules. Set warm white on a schedule and forget it for eleven months, then change it for one weekend when you feel like it.

Schedules and presets. Team colors on game night. Orange and purple for the last week of October. Blue and white through Hanukkah. Red and green in December. Pink for one evening in February. None of it needs a ladder.

The track is UV coated PVC, in white, black, brown, grey or sand, chosen to match your fascia or gutter. In daylight it reads as trim. It is not aluminum, and anyone selling you aluminum track should be able to show you the product page.

One install, every holiday

This is the part most people have not thought about. Everyone budgets for Christmas. Almost nobody realizes the same install covers the rest of the calendar.

Same house, same fixtures, same wiring as the warm white photo above. Nobody went up a ladder between any of these nights.

Here is how 2026 and early 2027 line up:

Hanukkah 2026 begins at sundown on Friday December 4 and runs through Saturday December 12, per Hebcal and Chabad.org. Diwali 2026 falls on Sunday November 8, eight days after Halloween, which is exactly why the color-changing tier makes sense for households that mark both.

With fixed color seasonal you pick one look in October and that is the season.

With the color-changing C9 tier, one October install covers the whole Halloween through Christmas run. It starts at $1,400 for an average house, and that is the price for the season, not a price per holiday. Before we leave we build the schedule with you: orange and purple through the last week of October, warm white and gold for Diwali, amber for Thanksgiving, blue and white for the eight nights of Hanukkah, red and green in December. It changes on the dates you picked while you are asleep.

With permanent lighting, the calendar above is just a list of nights you happen to change the color.

If you light for exactly one holiday a year, the fixed color install at $799 is the better buy and we will tell you so.

Off the roofline: patio, bistro and event lighting

The roofline is not the whole job.

Patio and bistro lighting is the string of warm bulbs over a deck, pergola or seating area. It is the single highest-value outdoor lighting purchase most people make, because it gets used every warm evening rather than six weeks a year. It is quoted separately from the roofline and it can be installed any month the ground is not frozen.

The part worth asking any installer about is what the lights actually hang from. We run steel cable tensioned with turnbuckles, and the light string clips to that cable. It is more work than screwing in a few hooks and stringing the lights straight across, which is why most quotes do not include it. The difference shows up in year two. A light string carrying its own weight stretches, so the bulbs pull it down unevenly between anchor points and the run goes crooked and saggy. A tensioned steel cable holds one clean curve, and it takes the wind and ice load off the light string instead of leaving it on the wire and the sockets.

If you are comparing quotes, ask each installer that one question. The answer tells you what the run will look like next summer.

Event lighting is a separate conversation. Weddings, graduations, milestone birthdays, anniversaries, corporate evenings: bistro strings over a tent or yard, a roofline lit in the colors of the day, timed to the event and taken down after. Every one of these is a custom quote and they need real lead time, so call early rather than the week of. We will cover event lighting properly in its own post.

For businesses and storefronts

Commercial work runs on a different logic than residential. What matters is that the lights are on every night you are open, that nobody on your staff is on a ladder, and that the install does not happen during business hours.

Permanent lighting makes more sense commercially than residentially, for one reason: a storefront that lights its roofline every night of the year, not six weeks, gets far more out of the fixture. Add the ability to run team colors during a game, brand colors during a promotion and warm white the rest of the year, and it stops being a holiday expense and becomes signage.

Restaurants, retail, offices, HOAs and property managers all get quoted the same way: whole job, based on complexity, height and access.

When to book

It is late August. Here is the calendar that actually matters:

• Now through September: quotes and measurements. This is the cheapest, easiest time to get on the schedule and the only time you have real choice of install date.
• October: seasonal installs happen. October fills up, and it fills from the top of the list. Halloween is Saturday October 31, so anything Halloween-specific has to be done by mid-October.
• November: still possible, but you are taking what is left.
• December: service calls, not new installs.
• Permanent lighting can go up nearly any month, but installing it in September or early October means it is running for the entire holiday season instead of half of it.

The one honest piece of urgency here: if you want lights for Halloween, the decision has to happen in September. Everything else has more room.

Getting a quote

Send a photo of the front of the house, or just the address. That is genuinely enough to start. What we need to know is the roofline shape, the height, and whether there is anything in the way.

Go to hanginglightsclub.com for lighting, or reply to whatever thread you already have with us. If you are an existing Pane Pal customer, the fastest route is to mention it when we are out for your fall gutter cleaning: we can look at the roofline while we are on it and quote both together.

We install across Palatine, Arlington Heights, Barrington, Winnetka, Wilmette, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Northbrook, Glenview, Naperville and the surrounding suburbs. The Pane Pal service areas list and the lighting service area overlap almost completely.

Call or text Hanging Lights Club at (224) 642-8018.

Common questions

Is Hanging Lights Club the same company as Pane Pal?

Same owner, same crew, same service area, separate brands. Pane Pal is exterior cleaning: windows, gutters, roof soft washing, pressure washing, solar panels, dryer vents. Hanging Lights Club is lighting. They are separate businesses because they are separate trades, but you are dealing with the same people either way.

How much does Christmas light installation cost in Chicagoland?

An all-inclusive fixed color seasonal install starts at $799 and up, depending on the complexity, height and access of the job. The color-changing C9 tier starts at $1,400 for an average house, and that single install covers the whole Halloween through Christmas run rather than one holiday, on a schedule we set for you. Permanent roofline lighting starts around $3,000. Every one of those is a whole-job price, not a rate per foot.

Do you use my lights or your own?

Ours. The strand is commercial-grade C9 LED, cut to your house, and it stays ours between seasons. We do not install customer-supplied retail light sets, because when a strand from a big box store fails in December the repair is not something either of us wants to be negotiating.

Will the clips damage my gutters or roof?

No. C9 clips seat on the gutter lip or under the shingle edge and come off without a mark. Nothing gets stapled or screwed into fascia. Where a gutter is already loose or pulling away we will point it out before we hang anything on it, which is one advantage of a crew that cleans gutters for a living.

Do the permanent lights look bad in daylight?

They read as trim. The track is UV coated PVC in white, black, brown, grey or sand, picked to match your fascia or gutter, and it mounts low profile along the roofline. From the street in daylight most people do not register it as lighting at all.

Can I really change the colors for every holiday?

On the color-changing C9 and permanent systems, yes. We set the holiday schedule for you at install so the changes happen on their own, and you can override it from your phone any night you want. On a fixed color seasonal install, no. You choose your colors when we install in October and that is the season's look.

Do you do patio lights and event lighting too, or only rooflines?

Both. Patio and bistro lighting over decks, pergolas and seating areas is a standard service. Weddings, birthdays, graduations and corporate events are custom quotes and need lead time.

What happens if a bulb goes out in December?

We come out and fix it, and it is included. In-season maintenance is part of the all-inclusive price, not an add-on. Same for a run pulled loose by wind or ice, and same for animal damage.

When do the lights come down?

January. We pull everything down and take it with us, so nothing is sitting in your garage and nobody in your house is on a ladder in the cold. If you want a different color combination next season, just tell us in September and we cut for the new look.

Do you install for businesses?

Yes. Storefronts, restaurants, offices, HOAs and managed properties, seasonal or permanent, scheduled outside business hours.