The Spring Hill Christmas Light Show brings joy and yuletide fun to Hernando County every year. This show runs from 6 pm to 10 pm daily from early December through early January and features 30 minutes of animated holiday lights set to music. The light show is located at 14641 Dilbeck Dr. Spring Hill, FL 34610.
The lights take a week to put up, but programing the lights to match with the songs takes hours of work. For every 10th of a second of each song, each light must be programmed to be on or off, a particular brightness, and (for the color-changing lights), a particular color. The act of programming the lights to play along with the music is called “sequencing,” and it involves playing the song at full, half, or even quarter speed over and over again to get the timings right. Then there are a number of playbacks both on the computer and on the lights themselves to see if it looks right. If not, then it’s back to the drawing board to start over.
There are currently 6,294 lights in the show, more than half in the light strands hang vertically along the house.
The entire show is computer controlled and fully automated. Various types of controllers animate the lights while the computer plays the music. The show surprisingly doesn’t run up an enormous electricity bill. This is because the show is almost 100% LED, with the exception of the Christmas light bulbs surrounding the candy canes and arches. Each light is only on for roughly 20% or less of the total time. The owner of the Spring Hill Christmas Light Show calculated the total cost of the show and it only comes out to $11 a month to run.
You can reach The Spring Hill Christmas Light Show on Facebook, where all this information was gathered.
