The Craziest DIY Chandelier

Today, I’m going to show you how my girlfriend and I made the craziest chandelier using rope lights, some stiff wire, and elbow grease.

The inspiration for this came from Modustrial Maker. He does a lot of work with concrete, and that wasn’t an option for me, but I want to be sure he gets credit for this.

Anyway, a few years ago, I had a mini chandelier. It was adorable.

Then I got a cat. Apparently the chandelier offended him so he did a big attack and knocked one of the little crystal thingies off. It fell onto my beautiful table, shattering the glass protector. That was a delightful way to spend an hour. Cleaning up shards of broken glass, while the cat watched me admire his work.

I brought the chandelier to my office, which had the added benefit of being silly, since I am the only person at my job with a chandelier. That also left my dining room without a light. That was fine because I don’t eat in my dining room much anyway. Then I saw the video above. It was so cool.

There were a few things to take into consideration though. One, I don’t know anything about concrete. Plus, I live in an apartment, so I can’t really have a big heavy thing pulling on the roof. Oh my gawd. Can you imagine if it fell and the giant concrete finished what my cat started and crushed my table?

I was able to find an LED 360 degree rope light on AliExpress for $20. Plus it works with Home Assistant. The idea I had was that I wanted it to look like it was floating above the table. I got some white wire loom to keep that hidden. I have wires for days, so I had the wire to extend it to the outlet. By default, the rope light is kind of flimsy. I wanted it to have a sort of random organic look to it. I had considered running a bunch of fishing line to various points along the rope, but gravity would just crumple it in the middle. If only there was some sort of wire or rod that is the thickness and bendability level of a coat hanger. It turns out there is. I found some 18 gauge wire at Home Depot. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be used for, but it was perfect for my needs. The only catch was that it was 100 feet long. I mean, it was super cheap, but now I have like 85 feet of this wire left.

The one hickup we ran into was that the LED had it’s own loom, and it was incredibly tight. That meant that feeding the metal wire through the loom was super duper difficult. I think we got about 4 feet in, and gave up. I think the loom on it was 3/4 inch, so I got more that was 1 inch. Another $5 later, and we were ready to go. I cut off the old loom, and then we taped the wire to the LED every foot or two. Then we fed that through the new loom.

With that done, I would have loved to use heatshrink to seal the ends, but apparently no one makes 1 inch heat shrink in white, so I had to white trash it and use gorilla tape. I also left about a foot of the wire hanging out the top, and put a loop in the end. That would give me the “floating” effect. With that done, we bent and shaped the rope lights as we liked.

This particular LED controller uses a webpage to configure. I had to bump up the brightness (and I’m still disappointed with how low the max brightness is). I had to configure the number of LEDs, and from there, you can set scenes, or use the preconfigured effects. Adding it to Home Assistant was easy.

Balerion the Dread screaming at the chandelier. So close, yet so far away.

All told, it cost less than $50 and is absolutely a conversation starter. My only regret was that the LED is not very bright. And I wish it had a higher pixel density. Each LED is independently addressable, which is awesome, but there’s only like one LED per inch. I was hoping for something that seemed like one solid light. Oh well.