When I bought these Govee LED light strips I had no intention of making a video about
them, but after installing them on my desk I found myself far more impressed by them
than I thought I would be.
So uhh... here we are.
In the past I've purchased LED strip lights like these but have always gone for the least
expensive sets I could find and those sets have always served their purpose just fine,
but they haven't impressed me in any way or anything.
They've always been somewhat limited in their color choices and very lack luster in their
available effects.
Also the adhesive backing on those cheap LED's has always sucked!
And even when they're brand new they don't really stick all that well to whatever surface
you apply them to.
When I bought these Govee lights though I decided I wasn't going to go for the cheapest
lights I could find this time around.
I bought 2 two meter strips that are advertised for TV back lighting.
They're powered via USB, have an inline controller for basic functionality but can also be controlled
with the Govee Home app from your smart phone or tablet and that is where these things got
interesting to me.
As for what comes in the box when you buy them... the first thing I pulled out was these
plastic clips which are used for keeping things nice and tidy when navigating 90 degree turns.
They have a sticky backing on them which is useful when applying them to the back of a
TV or something but you can also use screws if you're attaching them to a wall or some
other surface you're ok with screwing them into.
I then pulled the LED lights themselves from the box with it's included controller.
I will say the controller is a bit on the large side in my opinion, but for how I'm
using these light on my desk I was able to find a place and way to mount them that works
good for me.
Next is this alcohol wipe which is for cleaning off whatever surface you'll be applying your
RGB lights to... aaannnnd after that stuff most all that was left in the box is all the
obligatory documentation.
This card is the installation guide... this is Govee's disclaimer or safety warning sheet
to protect their butts from potential lawsuits if people happen to use the their LED's in
an unintended manner and cause harm to themselves, their property or others... this is the User
Manual which has instructions in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.
And last but not least we have this... it's basically Govee's business card.
I then took the stuff off my shelf and moved the shelf out into my hallway so I could put
the lights onto it.
I used the included alcohol wipe to clean any dust, oils or what have you off the back
edge of the shelf, laid the LED strip onto it, peeled off several inches of the paper
backing and using my tape measure carefully positioned and stuck down the first few inches
of the light strip.
I continued on down the strip in this same manner and when I got to the end of the shelf
I had several inches of light strip remaining.
These can be cut easily at the designated places with a pair of scissors like so; and
then you can finish sticking your LED's down.
Compared to the adhesive on other LED strips I've used before the 3M stuff Govee uses with
these... there is a night and day difference.
The cheap lights I've used in the past... the lights start falling off almost immediately
after you stick them on.
This adhesive on the other hand is very sticky.
I don't think these lights are going anywhere anytime soon.
I then applied the other strip of lights to the rear edge of my desktop and here's the
results.
I think it looks pretty good.
What do you think?
The controller has three different buttons on it... this one turns the lights on and
off.
This one cycles through 9 different colors and this last button switches to music mode
which animates the lights to any music or other sounds for that matter in your room.
(music playing) There are 4 different music mode lighting effects you can cycle through
using this button and if you hold this button down it becomes the brightness control and
there are 6 different brightness levels.
As nifty as all of this is, like I said at the beginning of the video it was the Govee
Home app that really took these LED strips to the next level for me.
It's a free app on both the Google Play and Apple App store.
Once you've downloaded the app you'll need to turn on your devices bluetooth and then
launch the Govee Home app.
After getting the app paired with your lights you'll have what to me is an astonishing amount
of customizability literally at your fingertips.
You can adjust the brightness from here, set up timers for the lights to come on and turn
off...
there's what they call the Effects Lab here that has two different tabs within it... this
is the Color Gallery where rather than 9 different colors... you can choose from what I'm guessing
are hundreds of different colors in the 17 categories here in the app.
Then there's the Effects Lab tab where they have 7 different categories here on the left,
each one with a varying number of different effects you can choose from.
I'm not going to go through all of them in this video because there's just way too many
and it would make this video really long and probably really boring.
Now backing out of the Effects Lab we have the different mode buttons here.
The first being Music where we can select which music effect we want as well as the
sensitivity of that effect.
There's this music sync from device option here which I haven't played with at all yet
so I don't know how that works.
The Color Mode here is the one I was the most impressed with.
It divides your light strip into 15 segments of 4 LED's each and gives you the ability
to change each segment to any color and brightness you want.
You can select from the colors in the pallet here, use this slider or go to the color wheel
which gives you the ability to dial in pretty much any color in existence.
I think they advertise it as being 16.9 million different colors.
Scene Mode allows you to choose from dozens of predetermined lighting effects which I
believe are the same ones we looked at in the Effects Lab and finally DIY mode is where
you can create custom animations and stuff.
Admittedly I haven't played around with this mode much because I'm more of a static color
guy, but having the ability to do custom effects like this is an undeniably cool feature for
those that want that kind of capability.
All this is really just scratching the surface too of what you can do with the app.
It has a bit of a social side to it as well where you can view pictures and videos of
other peoples lighting setups to give you ideas of things you may want to do in your
own home, as well as try out DIY effects others have created.
In January of this year I made a video where I built a projector screen and put it up in
our media room.
At the time I built it I thought about putting some LED edge lighting around it to add that
little bit of WOW factor to our room but in the end decided against doing that.
Well... after playing around with these lights on my desk for a few hours the idea to put
some edge lighting around our movie screen came roaring back (Chewbaca "Yah!") and I
just HAD to order a set and install them to the back of our projector screen.
I had to add some wood strips to the back of the screen to mount them to but got that
taken care of fairly easily and now here's how it looks...
My wife thinks they're completely unnecessary and... she is right.
But it sure does look cool.
If it isn't obvious already I'm going to say, I really like our Govee RGB LED lights.
They have really good brightness and color compared to other strips I've used before...
the adhesive backing actually sticks to the surface you apply it to and the amount of
effects and customization they're capable of I feel makes Govee definitely worth considering
if you're looking to add some RGB accent lighting like this to something in your home, studio
or whatever.
Ok... this is the part of the video where the few of you that are still here watching
will also navigate to the next video you want to watch or back out of YouTube altogether
and go do something else.
If you enjoyed this video, there's those YouTube things that let me know how much you liked
it and if you'd like to grab yourself a set of Govee lights I've placed a link to my Amazon
store in the video description where you can pick up either of the sets I featured in this
video.
Thanks for watching, I hope you have a great day and we'll see YOU, in the next one.
Ok... we'll catch ya later.