She asked me this at Christmas. Proper asked, not in that special children’s question way where they’ve already made up their mind and are just waiting for you to say yes. Bought some solar fairy lights for her window box, the outdoor kind. Fat bulbs, proper weatherproof rating and then fell in love with them and wanted to string them round her bedroom ceiling instead. “Can I just….bring them in?” And I did what I always do when faced with these questions, which is reply “well” in that special parent tone that actually means I know and then realise halfway through the sentence that I don’t. Not really. Not truthfully.
See, I’ve plugged outdoor lights into gardens since 1994 approximately.
Replaced them, traded up, shouted at them when they’ve thrown a floppy sock in after one damp summer.
But I’ve never asked that question, ever thought to ask whether you can go the other way. Whether that traffic flows both directions. There’s been outdoor lights for outside and indoor lights for inside, that’s all I’ve ever known. An insideoutsideborder down which things are implicitly allowed and prevented from travelling and never questioned, like you don’t question why the good towels get kept in the airing cupboard.
I looked it up, because obviously I did, and it turns out it’s juicier than you’d think
The TLDR, the answer I eventually gave my niece when I’d stopped hedgeching-fence-sniffing, is yes you can bring outdoor string lights indoors. No, by the way, you can’t take indoor ones out of doors and be sensible about it, which is the annoying half of the equation nobody mentions. Outdoor lights are outdoor lights because they’re made tougher. They’ve wiring sealed against rain seeping in, frost, the relentless batterying that is Sheffield weather. They’re built to withstand more than your indoors cares to throw at them. Plug them inside and you’re not reducing their safety, you’re upgrading it. They’re built for hunting Minecraft and you’re asking them to take it easy in PeeWee’s-playhouse-bedroom decorator lights. All that concern about them being outdoors is extra. Stuffing them indoors is like wearing Chelsea boots on holiday. Too much, not dangerous.
What tripped me up, and this is the bit you should linger on rather than skipping to the bit where I actually answer the question again, is that outdoor-rated isn’t one single rating. It’s a range. And your expectation that any string lights bought with muddy boots in mind are gonna automatically work aesthetically from atop your mantelpiece isn’t always correct. Some outdoor sets are built industrial. Bulky black cable, huge white Barnsley-on-steel bulbs. Practical. Made to attach to a fence in January and survive both financially and aesthetically, and taken indoors those types just look like….well like outdoor lights in your bedroom. Domestic crime. Others are far more….delicate is the word, warm white instead of jailnight.SecurityBlob. Thin copper wire and designed with someone’s patio in mind first and oh hey they won’t sink into that decor second, and that’s the sort you want indoors. I have one of those sets, bought outdoor desperate about six years ago and using to wrap around my bedroom mirror instead because they actually looked worse outside than they did living indoors. Never bothered to revert them.
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The other snag for me was plug types. Which is boring until you find yourself standing at 11pm thinking about it and realising that your favourite outdoor lights won’t actually plug into anything in a position you’re happy leaving visible. Outdoor lights these days, especially the plug-in as opposed to battery/solar ones tend to come with assumptions built into their rating about being plugged into an outdoor outlet or specific transformer box, and that box is not always something you want hanging behind your handshaken so it looks like an unintentional kiwi.
Not wrong, that. Just….big. Again, not advice against buying said lights, but forewarning to save you finding this out with them half draped across your room and the transformer waggling about behind your settee like an experiment gone wrong.
Where I landed, and where I still wouldn’t
I want to take a moment and tell off past-me, about a decade and a half past who’d have said outright no outdoor lights indoors exist except to mock your domesticity. They didn’t. Absorbed that rule like others. So many of us absorb these tiny household regulations without ever questioning if they were written on paper anywhere. Outdoor lights being indoor ones is safer than the reverse, every step of the way, and once I realised that…I felt silly not knowing it thirty years after I started doing diy bits.
Where I’d still draw the line, and advised my niece to draw it too, was solar.
Now this isn’t because of any safety worries, there aren’t any, but solar panels on indoor windowsills battling it out against net curtains and Sheffield’s approximation of sunshine just aren’t gonna recharge the way they do when clipping cheerfully to your garden fence.
You’ll get half an hour of light then resent when they don’t illuminate your entire life like Pixar suggested they could. Fact. But mostly fair_warning, they’re trying their best in a situation they were never designed to do their best in.
I’d still draw a line at heavy duty stuff too, the sort of outdoor light kit designed to cope with being buried under three feet of snow comes attached with enough rubber casing to look wrong indoors. Like, glaringly wrong. Garden kit that’s uncleared security so rightfully indoors unless you picked them as much for looks as functionality and really, truly loves them inside. But if they made them for the garden and you love them indoors? Bring them in. I did.
