Club Cobra - Reduce your Carbon Footprint, Fix your Christmas Lights!!

Man o man, here we are again, bringing out the Chrismas decorations. My wife has a whole (separate) attic location dedicated JUST to Christmas stuff. Takes her two weeks to get it all out and up. Thank goodness I am not repsonsible for helping with that. BUT. I do have one part. And that is getting the tree down (one of those prelit jobbies) and getting all those exterior lights out and up. Every year, I end buying 15-20 new strands because of dead strings (not just burnt out bulbs). This year was no different. At $1.50 a strand, who cares? ME!! Thats who!! Drives me nuts! Can't stand fixing a string when I could buy one so cheap. So, I toss the old (increase my carbon footprint) and buy some new.

Well, got to talking about this at work today. Guess I'm not alone. Did you ever stop to wonder how a light bulb could burn out and not kill the string?? Its darn near a total mystery to me. And I am an engineer! And then at other times, one half (or the whole) string will not light! Wassup with that? So, I googled it. Finally found out about the magic behind modern Christmas lights. (do your own homework here!). Turns out there is a tool that you can buy called "Lightkeeper Pro". Yes, it costs more than the strings I buy in one year ($18). But good luck getting one. Seems they are dam popular. Insert an empty socket into it, pull the trigger about 10 times and dam if most of the lights don't come back on! Once you know why, its not so surprising, but it is a really cool tool. Happy hunting! I'm sure I am not alone in this one!:LOL:

Mike

PS: Buy extra strings as donors when you buy lights...there are good reasons why random new lights will not work in old strings.