Seasonal Lighting

String lighting in the marketplace

String lights have always been a popular consumer product, but in recent years their use as a year-round product for outdoor spaces has expanded this type of lighting beyond purely seasonal. 

Seasonal lighting

UL Solutions tests seasonal decorative lighting products to ANSI/UL 588, the Standard for Safety of Seasonal Use Decorative-Lighting Products. 

We also offer a service bundle that includes Energy Star® qualification, which is key to increasing product competitiveness in this market. In addition to improving product appeal and helping manufacturers market their energy-saving decorative lighting strings to the North American market, our integrated compliance solution adds value by offering both safety and energy-efficiency testing for decorative lighting strings in a single program that simplifies the application process and reduces administrative costs for manufacturers. 

Additionally, this offering helps enable manufacturers to meet shipment deadlines through more effective integrated compliance assessment processes that allow them to have better control of the testing and certification work.

Year-round decorative string lighting

Since UL 588, the Standard for Seasonal and Holiday Decorative Products, originally only covered string lights with an installation and use not exceeding 90 days, in recent years we have developed new requirements under the category of DGZW within UL 588 to distinguish these string lights for all-year use from seasonal use lighting strings.

Additional requirements include:

• Increased minimum American wire gauge (AWG) size
• Increased insulation thickness of the wire
• Additional flexing
• More rigid strain relief testing
• Different safety instructions and markings

UL 588 and UL 153, the Standard for Portable Electric Luminaires, can be used for string lights for all-year use that use 18 AWG and larger cord sizes. UL 588 is the only applicable Standard for string lights for all-year use employing cords smaller than 18 AWG. All other seasonal and holiday decorative products, regardless of the cord size, are only covered under the scope of UL 588.

Safety and testing lighting services

We provide safety and compliance testing and certification services to the decorative and seasonal lighting industry to help ensure products sold in the market comply with applicable requirements and differentiate the different types of string lights in the marketplace.

Contact us to get the conversation started about your project today.