More Christmas lights went up today. Again this year we’re running up against an issue that seems to get worse every year. Our existing light strings have been in use for years and they’re slowly but surely starting to fail.
Many strings of mini-lights come in strings of 75 or 150 or 300. You’ll notice these are all multiples of (3×25) which has a foundation in how they’re designed. They also tend to fail a third at a time. In general, if one or two or three lights burn out in a 25-light subset the rest of the lights will continue to light. But at some point, and I don’t know where that point is, enough bulbs will burn out so the whole 25-light subset goes dark. What you see in practical terms is a string of lights that’s 1/3 dark or 1/3 lit.
Due to time constraints in putting up the lights in the last couple of years, some of the 300-light strings that have one or two of the 25-light subsets out would get put up anyway. But this year we’re finding more and more that are 2/3 out instead of 2/3 lit, and I won’t put those up.
It’s a real pain, a very time consuming one, and very frustrating to find repair these light strings. It’s pretty much trial and error to find which bulbs are burnt out bulbs and replace them. Therefore, conventional wisdom says these lights are disposable. A set of 300 lights costs something on the order of $30, so it’s much easier to simply toss the old lights and buy new ones. A set can last for five or six or ten years, so take what you can get and then dump and replace them.
My worldview has problems with that. I know that, if there was a way to identify which lights are out and replace them quickly and easily, a “dead” string of lights is actually 80% to 90% good. Why should I throw it out because 10% to 20% is bad? Things should be durable. If something is 90% functional, it should be possible to fix the broken 10% in order to keep the whole thing working.
As a result, while I don’t put up the strings that are 2/3 dark (because there’s only a dozen or so dead lights on a 300-light string), I don’t throw them out either. I’ve got dozens (if not hundreds) of these old lights in the garage, just waiting for an easy way to fix them.
I understand that it’s a matter of economics. In addition, it’s not black and white, but a spectrum. I don’t think any of us would junk a $50,000 car because the radio’s broken, or even if the $5,000 engine or transmission is having problems. On the other hand, I don’t think any of us are recycling paper plates. We all have our point along that spectrum where we put the durable/disposable mark. Mine is just a little bit more off to the one side than most people’s.
There are all kinds of little gizmos you can at the hardware store or by mail order that claim they can solve this problem, allowing you to quickly and easily find the burnt out bulb. I have yet to ever find one that actually works.
It’s frustrating. It should be an easy problem to find a solution for. Right at the moment I don’t have hundreds of dollars to buy new lights, but the number of “dead” sets I have is disturbingly high this year.
Maybe with the NaNoWriMo thing behind me next week I can do some more actual experimenting with the problem. God knows I’ve got enough material to experiment on and nothing to lose.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 