Christmas tree lights AAARGGGGHHHHHH

[10x]

Why is it that the lights worked fine last year. We don't even take the tree apart to store it in the basement in a corner where it is not disturbed.
Today 60% of the lights won't work. I am going to spend all day restringing lights. I sure won't make it to the gun show today.

This is the one thing I don't like about the Christmas season, non functioning Christmas tree lights.

Sorry, for ranting.

[Gman]

Sorry, for ranting.

I'll rate that as a 1. Needs more expletives and emotion.

Do you have a cat?

[sniper7]

Burn it and buy a new one.

[gnihcraes]

So much less stress when I just don't mess with any of this. Wife and kid put it all up usually. So relaxing. (for me)

[rondog]

Built-in obsolescence. Pre-wired trees are hateful Commie shit, good luck finding bulbs for it. It's probably hacked your wi-fi too.

I just give the useless prewired lights the finger, and put new strings on over them.

[stodg73]

Change to LED bulbs....

[Erni]

Foxtrot. You gonna tease like that, then you need to run a post with pics for the other geeks here.

[Irving]

You know THAT guy that you hate during the christmas season? Ya, it's me.

Last year I made my lights from scratch, using WS2811 programmable LED's, painted green and wrapped with electrical tape on the bases, made fancy plugs so my family would never screw them up plugging the strings into each other, and made a fancy power supply that feeds through the trunk of the tree and has "branches" to inject 5V power into every string (a requirement). Then it hooks into a wireless ardunio. (Internet of things.) I made sure to carefully wrap the entire string onto cardboard last year so it went up in one go this year and works like a dream.

It pulls it's colors off of a webpage - as do my other lights. So now I have a tree that can be lit in any color scheme with no effort on my part, coordinated with all my other lights, plus has effects that no commercial tree or light system can ever hope to match.

Yeah, I'm that guy everybody hates around Christmas time. But, I worked on that stuff before christmas and don't burn time on football

Why would someone do this? Because they hate setting up for Christmas as much as you do. I've been installing WS2812 "pixel" LED strips everywhere too, permanently - under rail installations, under cabinet installations, etc. Most of the year they are white, but when holidays roll around they can automatically roll into holiday mode (or whatever scheme) with no effort on my part. So, with a lot of work in advance, I get really high end displays/lights that nobody else can duplicate and I don't ever have to screw with. I only have to spend about an hour or two moving forward each year to setup the tree, and I get nice accent lighting the rest of the year. (Or fun lights for events or parties).

When I do the deck rail lights I'll move to the 12V strips as they are pretty much impossible to kill, I expect those will last a couple decades.

I have some areas that need light, but I don't want to install regular can lights (especially since I just blew 15 bags of insulation into my attic). I'd like to use LED light strips, but am not sure which would be best for permanent mounting. I've got some experience with the strips (I'm cutting my teeth on the soldering iron trying to solder strips together), but any tips on products or techniques would be welcome, if you ever start a thread about it.

[Bailey Guns]

Ignore Christmas. That's solved a lot of problems for me over the years.

Thanksgiving and Independence Day are my holidays of choice.

[beast556]

Switched to LED's a few year back, put brass hooks on the house and now lights are a non issue and take very little time. Christmas tree is all LED's now and has been trouble free. Gonna set it up in half an hour and see how it goes this year