What to Expect From Your Christmas Light Install in Calgary

Anyone who’s lived in Calgary knows the weather doesn’t follow a schedule. It can be plus 10 on Tuesday and minus 25 with blowing snow by Thursday. For a company that spends the season on ladders and roofs, that shapes almost everything about how we work. Here’s how an install with us actually goes, from the first estimate to spring takedown, and what happens when the forecast has other plans.

It starts with an estimate. Our online estimator only needs a few answers about your home and trees, and it gives you a price instantly. It’s surprisingly accurate, and it saves you waiting on a callback just to get a number. If you’d rather talk it through, email is the best way to reach us. We’ll set up a phone call for a time when we can give you our full attention and answer everything you want to ask. Once your booking is confirmed, your job goes into the queue for the week you picked, and from there it’s up to our crews and the weather.

On install day, our crews clip every C9 bulb by hand along your gutters and peaks so they all face the same direction. It takes longer than draping a strand, but it’s what gives a house that clean, even line you notice from the street. Trees get wrapped with our C5 strands, and we mix strand lengths so there’s no extra wire bunched up at the bottom. If your home has gutter guards or flashing only, our standard clips won’t work since they’re designed to sit in the gutter. In that case, we screw rubber clips into the fascia under the eavestrough to hold the bulbs in place.

Safety and the Weather

Working at heights is dangerous, and we treat it that way. Every installer is fall safety trained, our team leaders all have at least three years of experience, and we harness in whenever we’re working in trees. We follow a written safety policy and procedure manual, and every employee has the right to refuse any task they don’t feel they can do safely. We’d rather come back another day than have someone take a risk on an icy roof.

That’s also why reschedules happen. If freezing rain, high winds, or snow on a roof make a job unsafe, we push it. To keep things moving, we run four crews on Saturdays to catch up on anything that got bumped during the week, and if your install was one of them, you become the first job of the day that Saturday. In rare cases where a job just can’t be done safely, we may have to cancel. We know getting rescheduled is frustrating, especially if it happens more than once, but we’d still rather tell you “not today” than put a crew in a bad spot.

After the Lights Are Up

Occasionally a strand fails after install. When that happens, it’s usually one bad strand affecting the rest of the run, and we’ll be back within 72 hours to find it and replace it. Our lights carry a four-year warranty when we install and remove them each season, which is one of the reasons we only install our own lights. We know exactly how they’re built, so we can stand behind them. The one thing the warranty doesn’t cover is clips. They get brittle and break over time, so we replace some every year, and you may see a small charge for them on your invoice.

Payment is due the same day as your install. That surprises some people, but our season runs about 80 days and costs over $200,000 just to get started. Getting paid right away is what keeps the whole operation running through the busiest weeks of the year. If you’re outside the city, there’s also an out of town fee to cover fuel and crew time.

Taking It All Down

Residential takedowns start April 1. That date isn’t random. Shaded gutters often hold ice well into spring, and pulling clips out of frozen gutters damages both the clips and the lights. If you want your lights down sooner, we’re happy to come out early, but we’ll charge for the extra trip. Takedown runs about 30% of your install price because we use a pole to pull the lights off the gutters and peaks instead of unclipping each bulb by hand. If you’d prefer individual removal, we can do that too, but it’s priced the same as the install.

You’re also welcome to take your lights down yourself. Just keep in mind that if any strands get damaged along the way, we’ll need to charge for replacements when we put them back up next season.

The short version is this: book early, expect the weather to have a say, and know that when we reschedule, it’s for a good reason. Get your price through our online estimator, or send us an email with any questions. We’re happy to walk you through it.