Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Christmas Lights
Over the last week, I've been working on getting our Christmas lights hung on our house. Unfortunately, we had a problem with our lights! Every string had half the lights out. At first, I wanted to just replace all of our lights, but money is tight with the Christmas season, so I figured I could just fix it. I had a tough time at first figuring out the problem because I was so frustrated. Eventually, through the constant prodding of my lovely wife (I love you!), I hunkered down to figure out the problems. Turns out that we had multiple bad connections in parallel sections of the light strings. Using a multimeter, I narrowed down the bad lights and replaced them all. Juri even helped me out, speeding the work along nicely! So, now all I have to do is hang them!
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2 comments:
How exactly did you pin point the light(s) taht were dead with the DMM?
Wow, this was an old post. It was a real pain in the butt to isolate the bad lights and working in a small space with an old multimeter. But I used some basic troubleshooting techniques to discover the bad lights.
Take your light string and plug it in. Remember that working with household voltage is lethal and can kill you if you aren't careful. Work with a friend. I'm not responsible if you get hurt doing this.
Determine if your lights are in series or in parallel. Parallel light strings are basically several series strings that are in parallel to each other. They usually have three strings of wire wrapped around each other. A series string will usually have only two wires. If you have a parallel string, you should only have a small section of lights to work with unless you have many bad lights.
Split the bad string in half. Take out the light in the center of the string while leaving all other lights in. Since most Christmas lights have a outlet on the opposite end of the plug, insert one end of your multimeter lead into the plug and the other lead into the line side of the light socket. Make sure your multimeter is set to AC voltage. If you have voltage, then the upstream side (the series of lights closest to the power) will all be good lights and the downstream side will have the bad light. Vice versa if you don't have voltage. Put the light back in and move upstream or downstream, splitting the section in half and doing the same thing. Repeat until you narrow it down to the bad light.
I know I've already said that this is a big pain in the butt. My fingers were cramped and my eyes were strained and I really felt that it was just worth it to buy new lights. However, I'm sure I saved us a good $50 or so and I save the environment some garbage piling up in a landfill somewhere.
I hope this helps and that you could follow what I was talking about. Good luck!
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