The Trouble with a Pre-lit Tree

As mentioned in my previous post, we have already come across some decorating obstacles this year and we haven't even gotten through half! There's always a thing in decorating every year that causes me an exorbitant amount of frustration during the decorating process. The thing that follows me around in every project, even when I get to something easy that I have done many time with no problems, there the thing is, looming over the entire project, a menace to my Christmas spirit. This year that thing, that menace, is the lighting!

Last year we made two major Christmas decoration purchases: My big, beautiful, 9 foot, pre-lit, fake-but-doesn't-look-fake Christmas tree for the living room and we made the switch from some hand-me-down icicle lights to the C9 LED lights. We made these investments thinking that they would look good, but also make our lives easier. The LED lights are supposed to allow you to plug in a million strands to one outlet without shorting anything out and the pre-lit tree is only three pieces instead of 72 and is PRE-LIT!

Tony attempted to put up our Christmas lights outside the day after Thanksgiving. He plugged in each strand in the house to test it before putting them on the roof and all worked well at first. Then he gets to the last 3 strands that wimped out on us last year halfway through the Christmas season, and of course only half of them work. So we took an hour and a half to part out the last three strands and make one Franken-strand.  Once that is up, we had two additional strands that we bought this year so that we could do some additional areas that we had not done previously. Apparently this years warm-white of the same brand, is not the same as last year's warm white...BAAAAH!!! On top of that, once the lights that made it onto the house were plugged in, there were huge spans that didn't light up, so frustrating!



Meanwhile, I'm inside, oblivious to the Christmas Menace (officially my version of Dexter's Dark Passenger), starting to put together my tree. I put my three pieces together on the base and plug them into one another. I stand back and marvel at the simplicity of my new tree. I plug it in and turn it on, only to see.....

That's right..not one, but TWO sections of lights out. That's, oh....500 tiny light bulbs to take out and test with a new one..I don't think so! To the Google! So away we went, furiously typing and searching for a way to nip our Christmas menace in the bud. Here's what we came up with:

The LightKeeper Pro Light Tester. It is available at your local home improvement store for about $20. I had always been skeptical of these, because, in  my experience, there is no easy solution to an annoying problem. Tony saw a demonstration of it being used on YouTube and it looked promising, so we invested the cash to try to save ourselves some time....insert droopy, disappointing sound-byte here. This thing may work...but it certainly did not for us. Back to the Google!

Upon further investigation we found out that a lot of light strand have a bulb in them that is a different color at the base of that individual bulb. These bulbs are fused into the strand and once it has gone out, the whole strand is done. Want to know how we found that out??

Before: 

("check out this different colored bulb, I bet this is the problem")

After:

("Why won't this bulb come out!?")

So our only solution to the section that was out on the top part of the tree was to completely take out the entire section of lights and restring it with new ones. Let  me tell you guys...they are not messing around with making sure that those lights that came on it are NOT going anywhere. I felt like a dog trying to turn a doorknob! There were clips and zip ties and the strand of lights was one big loop, no end to weave in and out of these branches. It was a 2 hour long nightmare folks, but it works. 

As for the bottom strand we (meaning Tony, I was working on the top half doing my best not to throw the tree out the window!) did a close inspection of all of the light bulbs. Tony ended up finding that a couple of the bulbs were shattered. This turned out to be pretty dangerous when he took a closer look and found that the filaments were still slightly attached and were throwing tiny sparks!! This is how house fires get started people!! After safely unplugging the tree, we successfully changed out the shattered bulbs and all was well on the bottom strand. Moral of the story on that strand: put your tree back into the ridiculously small box it came in very carefully so as not to shatter any bulbs and expose live wires!!!

In the end of our, not even close to done story, the tree is lit and beautiful once again....and we haven't even attempted to battle with the outside lights after that nightmare!! We still have so many more lighted decorations to put out and I am terrified of my Christmas Menace returning to thwart my Christmas decorating plans once again! Until next time, Happy Decorating!!