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For student digs, living room parties, man-cave / she-shed, your home bar, or even businesses, the Govee Neon Rope light can produce a stunningly distinctive central lighting feature. And at $70 the price is perfect.

Neon lights are the most evocative of all lighting options, with a single motif to show a brand, signage, or just a simple bit of line art. But the problem with actual neon lights is that they're made of glass, very fragile, and cost an absurd amount if you want a custom design or something big. But thanks to Govee, you can get the same effect as custom-designed neon lights, at a fraction of the price, and with smart Wi-Fi control to boot. Oh yeah.

Unboxing and Planning Your Design

This Govee Neon Rope Light (model number H61A0) is a single three-meter long strip, fully encased in flexible white silicon, with only the front panel being illuminated. There's also a two-meter plain white power cable.

Affixing the Govee Neon Rope Light is easier than I was expecting; but also requires more planning. I'd recommend making your design first on the floor for a rough idea of size, but if your design includes any extreme bends, you'll have to imagine that part (or weigh bits down with a heavy book).

It's a good idea to plug in and power on the rope before affixing it all to the wall. The rope light includes an inline remote that can turn it on and off, cycle through simple colors, and has a few music reactive modes built-in too. But for the widest choice of ambient lighting scenes, you should install the Govee app and connect the rope light to your home Wi-Fi.

Open up the app, add a new device, search for "neon", and it should then locate your rope light over Bluetooth. I had no problem connecting the strip to Wi-Fi. Despite the app saying it needs 2.4GHz, it worked fine on my dual-band network just next to the access point. We'll talk more about the app features later.

Fixing the Rope Light to a Wall

Assuming everything works, onto the final install. While we went for a standard wall install, nothing is stopping you from fixing this to a ceiling or tabletop, for instance. But it's not rated for outdoor use, so if you want this to be visible from outside, you'll need a secondary flat surface to mount it to before placing it inside a window.

I was fully expecting to have to peel off the sticky back from three meters of LED strip and carefully mount every inch. Instead, you get a set of ten sticky clips into which the rope light is secured. This makes it easier to get nice flowing curves without too much effort and make minor adjustments later. However, you can't get any really sharp bends - everything must have a pleasing curve.

You also get a set of IPA cleaning pads which you can use to clean the wall surface where you plan to place the clips. Should it still not be enough to make them stick properly, you also have a set of small screws. I needed neither - the natural chalk paint in our bedroom seemed to adhere well to the 3M sticky pads.

However, you need to carefully consider where to put those ten clips because that's all you've got. A lot of your design will just be dangling freeform. For our chosen motif of two hearts, we used a clip at the beginning of the rope, the end, each side of the V plunge of the heart shapes, next to the crossover points, and the last two clips where we felt it needed to be pushed or pulled a little. The end result is a lot better than if we'd have tried to stick every inch of the lights onto the wall, and feels very freeform.

Of course, your design can crossover the strip itself as ours has, though this does mean it won't be flush with the wall. As ours was behind the headboard of a four-poster bed, it didn't need to be perfectly flush. If you're putting this in a hallway, you might want to avoid any crossings.

The Govee App and Effects

You can control the Govee Neon Rope Light using either the Govee app, which is the same across the entire range of Govee products, or via Google or Alexa smart assistants. In close range, you get more customized control and design options via Bluetooth in the app, while Wi-Fi only gives a selection of ready-made scenes. While connected to Wi-Fi, you can even remotely control it while outside of your home, though I can't really see why you'd want to do that.

The scene selection has improved over the years I've been using Govee lighting products and is now quite extensive and ... eclectic. From a color-shifting aurora to flashing police lights, or a warming fireside flicker, you're sure to find some that you like -or can completely customize what's already there.

Alternatively, you can create your own scenes from scratch. It can either be static by assigning a color to each rope segment or dynamic, allowing you to customize the effect, colors, speed, etc. This works for sound reactive modes, too.

It's worth noting that these custom designs and dynamic scenes aren't saved to the light itself though. If the power is lost (standby is fine though), then the light will reset to a default mode, and you'll need the app to reactivate your own custom design or favorite scene using the Govee app. Using the inline remote will also overwrite your custom scene, as it's only able to cycle through a small selection of default color and music reactive modes.

The Govee Neon Rope Light offers basic Alexa and Google Home assistant integration), but it really is basic. You can adjust the brightness, change to another static color, or turn the device on and off. Unfortunately, you can't set specific scenes, and Apple HomeKit isn't supported.

What Did We Love About the Govee Neon Rope Light?

The overall effect is gorgeous, with vibrant colors that light up a whole room, and a truly unique custom design. So if you want one single centerpiece of lighting in your room, the Govee Neon Rope Light is a compelling choice.

In the end, we settled on a "romantic" mix of pink, red, and purple; or the night scene, which features a nice retro-wave style fade between blue and pink. I'll also note that it can get really bright. This is one of the few smart LED products that I've actually had to turn down to 50% brightness.

What's Not So Great?

If I had one complaint about the effects on the Govee Neon Rope light, it would be that the LED strip is split into control segments of three or four LEDs, rather than individual pixels. This can result in blocky transitions, which are more noticeable when used as a centerpiece than mere background or ambient lighting. As a result, some of the effects just don't look good on a rope light.

However, this is understandable given that the app is shared across the whole Govee product range - not all effects will work well for all products. So you might be disappointed by some effects, but you're sure to find some that also work great. And given that an expensive glass neon tube only has a single color, it's still a huge upgrade!

Should You Buy the Govee Neon Rope Light?

For student digs, living room parties, your man-cave / she-shed, home bar, or even businesses, the Govee Neon Rope light can produce a stunningly distinctive central lighting feature. And at $70 the price is perfect.

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James has a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and is CompTIA A+ and Network+ certified. When he's not busy as Hardware Reviews Editor, he enjoys LEGO, VR, and board games. Before joining MakeUseOf, he was a lighting technician, English teacher, and data center engineer.

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