How a professional festoon install actually happens

When you hire festoon from us — say the $895 package with 60 metres of lighting — the price includes delivery, installation and packdown. It's worth understanding what that installation part involves, because it's where the difference between a professional result and a sagging DIY string lives.

Our festoon is LED Edison-style: the classic round filament-look bulb, but LED inside, running warm white at 2700K. Each 5 metre string carries 25 bulbs at 20 centimetre spacing and draws just 20 watts, and the whole system is IP65 rated, meaning it's sealed against rain and dust. Every string and fixture is tested and tagged before it goes on a truck. That's the gear. The install is what turns the gear into the look: straight runs, even sag, hidden cabling, and light exactly where the event needs it.

A typical install takes 2 to 3 hours with our crew on site, and it follows the same sequence every time: confirm the plan against the real site, set the rigging, fly the catenary wire, attach and tension the festoon, run and test power, then walk the whole install as guests will see it. Packdown reverses it after your event, usually the next morning. The rest of this guide walks through each step, because clients who understand the process brief us better and get better results — and if you're comparing options first, our festoon lighting hire page covers the packages themselves.

One thing worth saying up front: none of this process exists to make hire feel complicated. It exists because festoon is overhead lighting at a live event — tensioned cable and glass-look bulbs above your guests for six or eight hours. Done properly, it's completely uneventful. The process is what makes it uneventful.

Every install starts with understanding the site, and for anything beyond a straightforward space that means a visit or, at minimum, good photos and measurements from you. We're checking four things.

• Distances: festoon is ordered and rigged in real metres, so we measure the actual spans — tree to tree, wall to pole position, corner to corner. "About 20 metres" that turns out to be 28 is the most common reason DIY quantities come up short.
• Anchor points: what exists to rig from, and what it can carry. A structural beam, a mature tree and a fence post are three very different anchors, and only two of them are usable.
• Power: where the outlets are, what else shares those circuits on event night, and whether the distances work — more on the 50 metre rule below.
• Access: how close vehicles get, whether there are stairs or lifts, and what the venue's bump-in window is. Access shapes crew size and timing more than clients expect.

From that we produce a plan: run lengths, pole positions if needed, power feed points and an install schedule. For weddings and styled events this folds into the broader design conversation — our event lighting design service covers festoon alongside every other layer. Quotes come back within 24 hours of an enquiry through our contact page, and a well-measured brief is what lets us hold that turnaround.

Here's the part most people don't know: professional festoon almost never hangs from its own cable. The load is carried by a separate catenary wire — a tensioned stainless steel cable flown between the anchor points first — and the festoon is then attached to that wire along its length. The lighting cable carries electricity; the catenary carries the weight. That separation is why professional runs stay straight and level for the whole event, while a festoon string hung by its own cable stretches, droops and strains its connections within hours.

We tension the catenary with gripple locks — small one-way cable locks that let us pull the wire to the right tension and hold it there without knots or clamps. They're fast to set, precise to adjust, and just as fast to release at packdown, which is part of how an install that took 2 to 3 hours comes down in a fraction of that.

When the site has nothing to anchor to, we bring the structure: freestanding poles on weighted bases, positioned to the plan from the site visit, with the catenary flown between them. Raised 3 metre beams ($200) lift runs over dance floors, walkways and service paths so no guest ever ducks under a cable. Trees make excellent anchors when they're mature and sound — we sling them with protective strapping rather than fixing anything into the timber, the same method behind our outdoor tree lighting installs. Every anchor decision comes down to one question: can it carry the tensioned load safely above people. If the answer isn't a confident yes, we rig differently.

The romance of festoon is the gentle curve — the swag — between attachment points. That curve is a design decision, not an accident. Too tight and the run looks like powerlines: technically neat, emotionally flat. Too loose and it reads as droopy and unfinished, and long spans start swinging in coastal wind. The professional target is an even, repeated swag across every span, which is only achievable when the catenary tension and attachment spacing are consistent — another reason the separate wire matters.

Span length drives everything. Short spans of 5 to 8 metres between points give a tidy, rhythmic look that suits courtyards and marquee interiors. Long spans of 15 to 25 metres give the dramatic single sweep that makes beach and headland venues look cinematic, but they need serious anchor points and proper tensioning because the loads grow quickly with distance. Height matters too: we rig so the lowest point of the sag sits well clear of head height, typically brought up over dance floors and walkways with raised beams.

This is also where quantity gets real. A zigzag canopy over a dining area consumes far more metres than the straight-line distance suggests — a 10 by 15 metre area can comfortably absorb the full 120 metre package ($1495) once the crossing pattern and sag are accounted for. It's why we quote from measurements rather than vibes, and why our wedding festoon lighting installs are planned on paper before a single bulb goes up.

Festoon power planning is simple to state and constantly ignored: we run a maximum of 50 metres of festoon per power source. Past that point on a single feed, voltage drop starts to show — bulbs at the far end run dimmer than bulbs near the plug, connections work harder than they should, and the install stops being reliable. So a 120 metre canopy is fed from three points, a 200 metre install ($1945) from four or more, each run home to its own feed.

The load itself is small. At 20 watts per 5 metre string, 50 metres of our LED festoon draws 200 watts — a third of an old toaster. The planning problem is never total draw; it's distribution and sharing. On event night your circuits are also feeding the caterer, the coffee machine, the band and the bar fridge, and it's always the kettle that trips the breaker, taking the lighting down with it. We map which circuits the lighting uses at the site-visit stage so that doesn't happen at 8pm on your wedding day.

Two power add-ons come up constantly. The dimmable controller ($145) puts the whole install on a dimmer, so the canopy can drop to a low glow for speeches and lift again for dancing — the single best value upgrade we offer. And for off-grid sites, generator feeds work fine with LED festoon's light draw; we position and cable the generator so it's neither audible nor visible from the tables. Because everything is IP65 rated and tested and tagged, outdoor power connections are sealed and safe in real weather, not just on a clear forecast.

Install day runs to a sequence we've refined over 10+ years in AV and events. The crew arrives inside the agreed access window and walks the site against the plan first — venues change, marquees land a few metres from where the diagram said, a new garden bed appears where a pole was going. Ten minutes of confirming beats two hours of re-rigging.

Then the build: anchor points set, catenary wire flown and tensioned with gripples, festoon attached and swag evened span by span, power runs cabled and taped or matted where they cross foot traffic. Every string was tested and tagged before it left our warehouse, but we power the full install on site anyway and walk every run looking for a dark bulb or an uneven span — then we walk it once more as a guest would see it, from the entry, at eye level. That last walk is where the small adjustments happen that make the photos.

Hire is 24 hours as standard, and packdown is included in every package price. We come back after your event — usually the next morning, so nobody is pulling cables around your guests at midnight — release the tension, coil the runs, drop the poles and leave the site as we found it. Running a multi-day event or a wedding weekend? Extended rental is $145 per additional 24 hours, which is regularly cheaper than a second install. And if your event is in the Northern Rivers, our Byron Bay festoon hire runs on local stock and local crew, which is what makes tight venue windows workable.

We'll be fair to DIY kits: for a permanent string over your own back deck, hung once and enjoyed for years, they're perfectly good. Events are a different problem, and the kits fail at predictable points.

• No catenary system: consumer kits hang by their own cable, so runs sag unevenly, stretch through the night and strain their connections. The tidy, repeated swag that makes festoon photograph well is a rigging outcome, not a bulb outcome.
• Quantity shortfalls: unmeasured spans and zigzag canopies consume far more metres than expected, and the kit that looked generous online covers half the dining area on the day.
• Power failures: long daisy chains on one plug, shared circuits with catering, no weather-rated connections — the classic mid-reception blackout has the same three causes every time.
• The height problem: anything overhead is a working-at-heights job carrying load above your guests. Rated rigging and someone competent on the ladder aren't optional at a real event.
• Nobody to pack down: at midnight, in formal wear, someone still owns those cables. With hire, that someone is us, the next morning.

Our packages start at $895 for 60 metres with delivery, install and packdown included — for most events, less than the true cost of buying, rigging and then storing a kit you'll use once. Browse the full product range or our services to see what fits, and send your site details through for a quote within 24 hours.