You can also test the outlet with a circuit tester. If that appliance doesn’t work either, find your circuit breaker and check for a flipped switch. (We know it’s silly, but we’ve all done it!) If you’ve plugged in your lights and nothing happened, unplug them and plug another appliance into the outlet. Step 1: Check the Outletįirst, make sure your lights are really plugged in. So, let us give you an early Christmas gift! Follow these steps to find a bad bulb on your Christmas tree lights. We want to take the stress out of your holiday season. (Or you just buy them online, but it’s still a hassle.) Plus, you then have to brave the cold weather, crowded stores, and close calls in the parking lot to get new strands of lights. The first-place winner? When you’ve gone through all that hassle, undone all the knots and kinks, and you plug in your beautiful lights to find them totally dead. In the next section, we'll take a look at how blinking lights work.Detangling your Christmas tree lights is the second worst thing about the holiday season. You point the tester at each bulb and it tells you which bulb is loose. There are inexpensive testers on the market that can help find loose bulbs faster. It's not hard to have a loose bulb because the sockets are pretty flimsy. Unless there is a shunt in the socket, a loose bulb will cause the whole 50-bulb strand to fail. The big disadvantage is the problem of loose bulbs. The big advantages of mini-bulb strands are the low wattage (about 25 watts per 50-bulb strand) and the low cost (the bulbs, sockets and wire are all much less expensive than a 120-volt parallel system). This wire provides the parallel connection down the line. If you look at a strand wired, you will see that there is a third wire running along the strand, either from the plug or from the first bulb. If you remove one of the bulbs, its 50-bulb strand will go out, but the remaining strands will be unaffected. These strands are simply two or three 50-bulb stands in parallel. Although you can buy simple 50-bulb strands, it is more common to see 100- or 150-bulb strands. This is known as being wired in parallel.
Half christmas lights out series#
Several series or groups of lights can be wired to just one plug. (A typical bulb has a resistance of 7 to 8 ohms through the filament and 2 to 3 ohms through the shunt once the coating burns off.) At that point, heat caused by current flowing through the shunt burns off the coating and reduces the shunt's resistance. The shunt wire contains a coating that gives it fairly high resistance until the filament fails.
If you look closely at a bulb, you can see the shunt wire wrapped around the two posts inside the bulb. This difference in behavior occurs because the new bulbs contain an internal shunt. Today, the bulbs can burn out, and the strand will stay lit, but if you pop one of the bulbs out of its socket, the whole strand will go dark. When mini-lights were first introduced, any bulb burning out would darken the entire strand. It breaks the circuit, so none of the bulbs can light. This explains why mini-light strands are so sensitive to the removal of one bulb. When a filament in one bulb blows out, it creates an open circuit in the wiring, so electricity is not passed along. So electricity must pass from one light to the next for the entire strand to light up. The lights in a 50-bulb strand are wired as a "series" of lights along one electrical path. Adding the two extras dims the set imperceptibly, so it doesn't matter. A typical strand today adds two more bulbs so that there are 50 lights in the strand - a nice round number. If you multiply 2.5 volts by 48, you get 120 volts, and originally, that's how many bulbs the strands had.
The key to using these small, low-voltage bulbs with normal house current is to connect them in series.
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