FAST Opinions

[Santacarl]

Hi all....

I've had this idea in the back of my head for some time about creating an "electronic snowfall." Looks like FAST might be the answer to that but I haven't seen them in person so I was wondering about how many it would take to present a reasonable facimile of a 'snowfall'..... My house is about 200 feet off the street and I don't have any trees to hang the FAST tubes in...so I would have to attach them to the house.....problem is my roof line is so high that I can't get up there so everything would have to be attached to the front of the house.....I'm thinking I might use the garage section (roughly 25 feet across and 2 stories with the top at the roofline forming a ^ shape) and was wondering how many 48" tubes it would take to look respectable...... Also since this is basically an inverted 'vee' shape....would that look natural as there would necessarily be fewer tubes at the top than there are at the bottom......so the 'fall' would appear narrow at the top and wide at the bottom....

The other option would be to run one row of tubes from one side of the house to the other.....but the 'fall' wouldn't be as long as they potentially would with the second story garage approach mentioned above.

I would love some insight from anyone with experience playing with these...... If this isn't likely to look good I'd prefer to spend the $$ on other forms of lights.....

Thanks

SC

[budude]

I think jklingert has one the best FAST displays - search around for one his posts with a video of them.

[dlovely]

I think jklingert has one the best FAST displays - search around for one his posts with a video of them.

Video is on the Wiki page.

[Santacarl]

Thanks for the link....I've seen that one before but not sure how many and what configuration they are in......so it's a bit hard to put into perspective.....

[Skunberg]

Thanks for the link....I've seen that one before but not sure how many and what configuration they are in......so it's a bit hard to put into perspective.....

The 18" video looks like the ones for sale. It's only 3 sections long and you may have up to 8 sections long (about 4ft). The speed of fall is adjustable. They are pretty easy to build. I can't imagine anyone not liking them. As far as how many you need, people shy away from such a subjective question. I've seen 3 along a roof line with icicle lights and he was very happy (I thought it was thin), I've seen them about every foot, look's great but would be a budget buster for a lot of people. Some people are mixing different lengths which look's very nice. So what's best for you, I'm not going to say. I plan on increasing mine to about 10 or 12 mixed 4ft and 2ft over 36ft of roofline.

Brian

[CaptKirk]

That video sure looks like a larege number of FAST tubes. The length of time of the fall makes me think there are more shorter implementations rather than all 48". In my case I am making sets of 4 x 12". I put two of the 7 LED sections together (the older style strips) to get the 12" section, then run scrap cat5 wire from the bottom of one tube to the top of the next one. You can also control each tube individually with their own FAST controller head. Keep in mind that you can go 2 x 2' (or any other combo up to the 48") also to get more coverage. I think that is the key- not a few LONG tubes, but a bunch of shorter ones at different heights.

Another way to get this to work for you might be to run a rope from the house out to your few trees and hang the tubes off those also. That is the theory that I am working on and I will know eventually how well it works: put them at varying heights, and at varying depths and as many as I can afford.