Christmas is literally right around the corner. Less than three weeks from now, the Holiday season will be over. If you haven’t hung up any Christmas decorations yet, now is the time! When you go to check if your lights are working this year and find some broken, Terry Ritter has the solution for you on fixing those Christmas lights.

The lights in these strings [Christmas lights] are basically in series, and any open connection, whether in a wire, at a socket, or even inside a bulb, will turn off that whole circuit. Normally the bulbs have a “shunt” which shorts the bulb when it experiences full line voltage. That leaves the bad bulb OFF, and the rest of that circuit ON, which shows which bulb to replace. Unfortunately, the shunt often fails to operate, and then an entire circuit is off.

Obviously, if the lights your trying to fix are 5 years old, its probably in your best interest to buy some new LED Christmas lights. If the lights your trying to fix are from last year, then you might want to do some diagnosing.

[Via Ciphers By Ritter]

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Economics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.