Brick Loot is a quirky company which was founded by a 9-year old boy and his mother. Parker is now 13 years old, but he continues to literally “run” the company—as you can see in the photo of him racing through the warehouse to send the light kits to me!

CEO Parker Krex at BrickLoot HQ. (Photo by BrickLoot.)

Brick Loot offers two different lighting products:

1. ‘Original Light Kits by BrickLoot’ include lights, cables, and instructions to add lighting to a specific LEGO set.
2. ‘Light Linx’ is an a-la-carte offering, allowing you to buy individual lights, cables, and power supplies to add lighting to your custom LEGO creations. (It will be covered in a separate review.)

Having just lit my Cafe and 50’s Diner using LED Christmas Lights, I was excited to add lights to my #10251 Brick Bank. I was expecting similar brightness and a similar installation procedure. I was pleasantly surprised by how much nicer these are!

BrickLoot Lighting Kit for Brick Bank.

The package included 4 bags of lights:

• The first bag is for the roof and upper arch lights.
• Bag two contains lights for the upper floor.
• Bags three and four contain lights for the ground floor and the street light.

The package does not include instructions or a battery box or other power supply for the lights included. However, there is a business card that gives you a link to a PDF instruction set. The online instructions had few words, but lots of pics that made it clear how it went together. It was also nice to be able to zoom into the pictures to see more clearly what was being done.

Installing Bag 1 of the BrickLoot lighting kit in the roof of the Brick Bank.

Fortunately, I keep a pair of needle nose pliers, a small knife, and a pair of tweezers next to my brick separator while working with LEGO—this came in very handy trying to keep the wires in the right place until I could secure them using LEGO bricks.

First bag of lighting installed.

I completed the first set of the instructions and lit up that string. I was surprised at just how much light was coming from the building—it was ablaze with lights and I still had three more strings to place in the model!

Installing lights in the ceiling.

The second set of lights are used to light the main level of the bank and small lights for the lights on each of the desks upstairs, which is a nice touch. Throughout the model, they included lighting hung from the ceilings as well as the lights for the arches. There is so much light that it makes it harder to notice the lights on the two desk lamps!

Installing the third bag of lights.

The third string lit the arches which illuminated the stained-glass windows on the first level and includes LED’s for the two entry lights. I was worried when I first started this that the wiring would be very visible and ugly. Thankfully, the instructions are very easy to follow to route the wires, and the wires are hardly visible from the front of the building. The only other challenge with installing the lights is getting the wire run to go properly for the street light. It’s hard to get it into place and have the tiles for the sidewalk lay correctly but looks ok with a little bit of work.

Adding lighting to the Street Lamp.

I was very happy with how much light there was, how brilliant everything looked. However, there is so much light that you tend to get a fair bit of bleed-through from the lighting. There are 3 LED’s per each arch on both facades. The upper white bricks have more of an issue with this than the lower grey bricks do, but both have this problem. I don’t think this is because the lighting is inside the included non-LEGO arches that are pre-wired, but a problem with the ABS in general as there is bleed-through on the sides of the building from the ceiling mounted LEDs as well.

Conclusion

Bright lighting in #10251 Brick Bank.

I also learned that the instructions recommend building the model first, then dis-assembling part of the model to install the LED’s (which are embedded in non-LEGO parts.) That’s what I did, but I think the next time I install a light kit for a modular building, I would rather install the lighting as I build model.

Overall, this BrickLoot Lighting Kit earns our Highly Recommended (4/5 star) rating. If it came with a better way to manage all the USB plugs and a battery box for the same price, it would earn a 5/5 star rating!