Should I lease or purchase Christmas lights?

Why OTHS Provides Leased Holiday Lighting (Not Purchased Equipment)

OTHS exclusively provides leased seasonal Christmas lighting for Salem and Albany Oregon homeowners and businesses. We don't sell equipment for you to install yourself, and we don't store your purchased lights between seasons. The lease model is what we do, and it's what serves most customers best.

If you're a committed DIY decorator who genuinely enjoys storing, replacing, and reinstalling lights every year, purchasing your own equipment is a legitimate path — it just isn't OTHS's offering. For everyone else, the lease is the better choice for the reasons covered below.

What's Actually Included in an OTHS Christmas Lighting Lease

The seasonal lease fee covers the complete service from end to end:

• Commercial-grade LED lights, clips, timers, and all required hardware — OTHS supplies and owns this equipment
• Design consultation tailored to your property's architecture and landscaping
• Professional installation by affiliate installers with 10+ years of Christmas lighting experience
• In-season maintenance throughout the holiday period: failed strand replacements, storm and wind damage repairs, timer or photocell troubleshooting — all handled by OTHS at no additional charge
• Scheduled removal in early January, including hardware and clip retrieval
• Off-season equipment storage by OTHS — your garage stays free of light bins all year

If you purchase your own lights, every item on that list becomes your responsibility: sourcing equipment, designing the layout, installing it (often on a multi-story ladder), troubleshooting failures during the holidays, taking it all down in January, and finding storage space that doesn't ruin the strands by next November. The lease consolidates all of that into one fee paid once per season.

Cost Comparison: Annual Lease vs Long-Term Purchase Path

A purchase looks cheaper at first glance — buy lights once, reuse for years. The reality is more layered.

Hidden costs of the purchase path:

• Equipment beyond the lights themselves: extension cords, timers, ladders, light clips, replacement bulbs as failures accumulate
• Time investment: even a modest residential install consumes most of a weekend; takedown is another day
• Storage space: Pacific Northwest moisture is hard on consumer-grade strands; basement or garage storage often shortens lifespan to 1-3 seasons before strands need replacement
• Design refresh: the look you bought five years ago is the look you keep, unless you re-buy
• In-season failures: when a strand dies on December 22, it's your evening to fix it
• Resale or disposal of obsolete strands as LED technology and color preferences evolve

The annual lease fee consolidates all of the above. There are no surprise repair runs, no garage shelves dedicated to tangled lights, and no need to budget for replacement strands or new design pieces year over year. The math is rarely as favorable to purchasing as the year-one comparison suggests.

Why Most Salem and Albany Customers Choose the Lease Model

Beyond the cost comparison, a few practical advantages drive the lease decision for most homeowners and businesses in our service area:

• Convenience: zero customer effort between seasons. We arrive, install, maintain, remove. You enjoy the display.
• Reliability: commercial-grade lights are built for outdoor commercial use and survive Salem winters far better than consumer strands. When something does fail, it's our problem to fix during the lease — not your evening project on Christmas Eve.
• Design flexibility: refresh your display annually as our designs evolve, without writing off years of accumulated equipment.
• Time value: even an experienced DIY decorator typically loses a full weekend to install plus another day to take down. The lease replaces all of that with a couple of scheduled appointments.
• Trust: every install is handled by an affiliate with 10+ years of professional Christmas lighting experience.

For Salem, Albany, and surrounding Willamette Valley properties, OTHS provides same-day estimates on new Christmas lighting lease inquiries. Contact us for current-season availability and design options.