Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights: An Unbeatable Price for Outdoor RGB Lighting

You won't find many outdoor RGB LED strip lights at better value than this.

Few accessories can transform the look of your home as much as an LED strip light. You can use the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights for everything from backlighting your furniture to illuminating your garden, and with 16 million colors to choose from you’ll have no shortage of options if you do so.

They might not be as smart as other strip lights on the market—not even the other strip lights from the same brand—but the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights are quick to set up, easy to use, and incredibly affordable.

Until February 14th, you can get up to 30% sitewide on the Govee store, meaning you can pick up the Phantasy outdoor strip lights for less than $50, with free shipping!

Introducing the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights

The Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights come as two five-meter strips that you can install indoors or outdoors at your home. Each strip uses RGB LED bulbs to offer 16 million colors and you can use different effects to fade, flicker, or jump between them.

Each strip is highly flexible and comes with a 3M adhesive backing that lets you attach it to any clean and dry surface. You can bend the strips around corners if you need to, but you may need to fold it in a loop to turn it at a right angle.

The strips are water-resistant to an IP65 rating, which means they’re protected against dust and water jets. They’re absolutely fine to use outdoors in rainy conditions—just don’t keep them submerged underwater.

Govee includes a pocket-sized RF remote control with the light strips, which you can use to switch the lights on and off, cycle between lighting modes, and choose between six different brightness settings.

The remote offers a 30-meter range, but for the best experience you need to use the Govee Home app to control the light strips over Bluetooth. With this app, you can also set timers, create DIY scenes, and browse the Govee Light Studio.

But above all else, the best feature of the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights is the price. At only $60, they cost less than half the price of an equivalent Philips Hue light strip, and the Govee strips are twice as long. Though you do get more smart home and automation options with the Hue alternative.

Quick and Easy Installation

Getting the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights up and running couldn’t be much easier. When you open the box, you’ll find the two five-meter light strips on separate rolls with a Control switch connecting them.

All you need to do is connect the Control switch to the supplied 12V power adapter and plug it into a wall. Then press the button on the switch to turn on the lights.

It’s a good idea to unroll the lights and power them on before you attach them to any surfaces, to make sure they work properly.

When you’re ready to install your lights permanently, remove the adhesive cover from the back of the Control switch and each light strip, then fasten it to any clean, dry surface.

For even better security, Govee also supplies you with 15 clips, screws, and plugs you can use to fix your strip lights to different surfaces. Though you’ll also need a drill to create pilot holes for these.

You’ll need to keep each strip relatively close to one another due to the short cable connecting them, but you get a good length between the power adapter and the Control switch.

Just make sure you’d got a waterproof outdoor socket to use if you want to install your lights outside.

Colors, Scenes, and Music Mode

Although you can choose between an enormous range of colors for the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights, you can only illuminate both strips in one color at a time. These aren't individually controllable "pixel" LEDs. On the upside, Govee gives you a decent selection of built-in scenes you can use to automatically shift between colors in different patterns.

Scenes

Scenes change between a set of different colors using different effects:

• Fade: Colors gradually shift from one to the next
• Jump: Colors instantly switch from one to the next
• Twinkle: The lights flick off, then flick on again in a new color

With the remote control it’s possible to switch between seven built-in scenes using the Mode buttons. But with the Govee Home app you can choose between 64 built-in scenes instead, or use the DIY option to create your own.

DIY Scenes

When making your own lighting scenes, you can choose up to eight colors—generating them from a photo or image if you like—and switch between them using any of the standard scene effects.

You can even drag a slider to set the speed of the color changes.

When you’ve finished your scene, share it with other people in the Govee Light Studio, which is also where you can save scenes other people made. There’s an enormous range of options here and you can apply scenes to your lights immediately even if you don’t want to save them.

Music Mode

Music mode on the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights uses a microphone on the Control switch to sync your lights to whatever music you’re listening to. When this happens, the lights should change in time with the music, creating a light show wherever you choose to set them up.

If the lights aren’t syncing to your music properly, you can use the buttons on the remote control to adjust the microphone sensitivity. Alternatively, move your music source closer to the microphone on the Control switch.

That said, this Music mode rarely works that well.

Activating Music mode certainly makes the light strips change colors more often, but they often do so with no rhyme or reason, and certainly no rhythm. A lot of the time, it didn’t seem to matter if I played soothing soundscapes, heavy metal, or complete silence; the lights always changed color randomly with little relationship to whatever sounds were around them.

Music mode certainly livens up the atmosphere with unpredictable color changes, but in my experience it only came close to syncing up with the beat when I played a metronome directly into the microphone or a dance track with an incredibly strong beat.

Smart Home Integration

You don’t need to use an app to enjoy the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights. They come with a perfectly serviceable remote control, which lets you change the colors, scenes, and brightness of the light strips. But pairing these lights with the Govee Home app gives you a much better experience.

Not only does the Govee Home app allow you to choose from a wider range of scenes, but it also lets you set up timers for your light strips. You can set four separate timers to control the lights, enabling them for different days of the week if you like.

You can also choose to slowly fade the lights on or off with the Wake-up and Sleeping timers.

Unfortunately, you can’t choose different scenes for your lights to use; they only ever switch on to the last scene or color you were using.

This isn’t the only limitation of the Phantasy Strip Lights; you also can't control them over Wi-Fi. This is despite the fact that other LED lights from Govee do work over Wi-Fi, which makes it an even stranger omission.

Similarly, you can’t pair these lights with any other smart home systems, such as Alexa, Nest, or HomeKit. That means there’s no way to control your Govee Phantasy lights from the same app you might use for non-Govee products, like Hue bulbs, Alexa speakers, or Nest thermostats.

Without smart home integration, you also lose the advanced automation possibilities that come with it. You can’t automate your Govee Phantasy Light Strips to turn on when you come home, nor can you sync them to work with other smart home accessories like motion sensors.

It is possible to add more Govee smart home accessories to the Govee Home app and create complex scenes that way, but even then it doesn’t offer the same options you get with better established smart home setups.

Should You Buy the Govee Phantasy LED Strip Lights?

Music needs a very strong beat to resemble a rhythmic light show, and these light strips are sorely lacking smart home integration. But they still offer exceptionally good value for money when compared to other water-resistant LED light strips.

The fact that you can set them up in under five minutes using only what you get in the box is wonderful. There’s no painful pairing process and you shouldn’t need to visit a hardware shop to pick up last-minute supplies.

The lights themselves are spectacularly vibrant and bright enough for most purposes, especially considering you get a total of 10 meters to play with. So I’d say they’re a solid purchase if you’re looking for a quick way to add a splash of color to your home—indoors or out.

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