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18 Dec 00 - 08:40 AM (#358957) Subject: Christmas Tree Lights From: Rizla the Green Can someone explain the scientific principle behind the fact that when you put a set of working christmas tree lights away one year, and never touch them during the year, they never bloody work the next christmas. I think it is a plot! |
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18 Dec 00 - 08:42 AM (#358961) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: A Wandering Minstrel You forgot to include the £5 note for the tree light maintenance fairy?? |
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18 Dec 00 - 08:43 AM (#358962) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler ...and no matter where you start to test them it's always the last bulb you test that has blown! RtS |
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18 Dec 00 - 09:12 AM (#358984) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Mrrzy Does anyone know if Concord Mass still has the bylaw of Only White Lights? And what is the general feeling here about outdoor displays - like them, hate them, love them, wish they wouldn't blink? I personally really like the icicle lights, and there is one huge house in my neighborhood that looks like a fairytale castle, don't know how they do it... |
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18 Dec 00 - 09:26 AM (#358993) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: MMario Most blinking displays drive me nuts....though I have seen some that achieved a "twinkling" effect -which I don't mind - I think because those were massive amounts of lights with only a few that blinked. The eerie green and red spotlights that a few home owners in this area use are also, in my opinion, the epitomy of poor taste. |
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18 Dec 00 - 09:41 AM (#358999) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Jimmy C I like christmas lights and always have some around the windows and through the bushes etc at the front of the house, as well as an almost life-size illuminated nativity scene on the back porch. There is a richy area north of where I live, and all the mansions really go to town with their decorations,(I don't live in a mansion). It looks like they are in competition with each other and the displays get better every year. Bus loads of people come from all over and tour the neighbourhood just to see them. One man starts putting them up in October just to be finished in time. He must have in excess of 10,000 lights, probably uses a generator to power them. Some of their driveways are so long with lights running up both sides they look like miniture landing strips. I would not like to get their hydro bill. We take the nephews and nieces and grandchild, along with some cookies and flasks of hot chocolate and do the tour ourselves. It adds to the Christmas feeling, especially since we always have snow. If you leave lights up all year, then small insects get inside during the summer and lay eggs there. The larvae gets between the connectors and the bulb will not light. I hate the ones that won't light if one bulb is defective. That drives me nuts. HO HO HO Everyone |
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18 Dec 00 - 11:11 AM (#359052) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: GUEST,rabbitrunning My experience has been that the more carefully you put away the lights (to ensure the minimum of tangling, and jarring bulbs) the more strings that work the next year. The first thing I always try when a string fails is to push in along the line of bulbs, to try to re-set each them in the socket. It works about half the time. Modern lights are supposed to have a little dohickus that causes a "short circuit" when they die -- which allows the rest of the bulbs to light, but it's a touchy beast and must be properly positioned. I really hate the cheap lights where the plastic work has been done so badly that you can't get the old lights or the new ones in without breaking them! |
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18 Dec 00 - 11:37 AM (#359061) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: pattyClink Listen to wise "rabbitrunning" about re-seating the bulbs by pressing them in. I'll bet an invisible film of oxidation forms in any of them where the bulb is a bit loose from the socket. |
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18 Dec 00 - 12:22 PM (#359092) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: sophocleese Well one year it was because mice had gotten into the box and chewed through half the wires. I like big interesting displays on houses that I don't live next to. Blinking lights are for indoor personal use, they drive me crazy if I have to see them all the time. |
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18 Dec 00 - 12:25 PM (#359096) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Morticia Well I have had the same set of lights for 20 years and they still work perfectly.......never get anything but thrown in a box either.Re. decorating the outside of houses, only a few people go in for here which makes it look a bit odd but I find them cheerful. Not sure how I'd feel living opposite to a house competing with Blackpool Illuminations though. |
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18 Dec 00 - 01:05 PM (#359119) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Kim C Mine always work. :) |
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18 Dec 00 - 01:44 PM (#359153) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bernard ...and no matter where you start to test them it's always the last bulb you test that has blown! Duh! Once you've found it, what's the point of checking any further?
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18 Dec 00 - 01:48 PM (#359156) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: mousethief With me, if I'm checking a string of 100 lights, the bulb that has blown will always be in the high 90's. If I start from the other end of the string, I STILL have to check 95 or so bulbs. It's never one of the first five I check. alex |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:02 PM (#359172) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bernard There's a scientific (and safe) way to do it. Unplug from the mains, find the middle, remove that lamp, and test with a continuity tester, multimeter, or battery and bulb. Test from one conductor to the mains plug, and one 'leg' will show open circuit. You have now eliminated half of the string from the problem. Halve that 'leg', and remove that lamp. This test brings the process of elimination to 75%... on a set of 80, that's 60 lamps which don't need checking... If you get continuity on both legs, it's the bulb in your hand with the fault... Okay, it may be tricky to identify which 'leg' is which, but the 'lay' of the cable is a clue - the anti-clockwise leg is usually the left hand contact, etc... Works for me, anyway. I rarely need to test more than 10 lamps on a set of 80.
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18 Dec 00 - 02:05 PM (#359174) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: mousethief I think it would be harder to understand your process, Bern, than just test 95 bulbs. |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:08 PM (#359176) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bernard O ye of little faith!! |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:08 PM (#359177) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bill D and on those little teeny Japanese lights (or Taiwanese...whatever)...there seem to be 23 different sizes, models and variations, none of which are interchangable! Even when I HAVE spare bulbs, they don't fit! They INTEND you to buy new strings on a regular basis. |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:09 PM (#359178) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bernard Ah, Glasshoppah! You have found the meaning of life!! |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:11 PM (#359179) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: mousethief Actually on the teeny bulbs, you can remove the bulb from the green (sometimes white) plastic base and insert it into the base from your old set. Usually; I recently bought a set where the bulb ITSELF was larger and wouldn't fit into the older base. They're catching onto me. |
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18 Dec 00 - 02:18 PM (#359188) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Bernard Fiendishly cunning, these Orientals... |
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18 Dec 00 - 03:52 PM (#359228) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: GUEST,Pseudolus I used to live in a neighborhood that had a lot of decorated houses. One year, one of the neighbors put up "chaser" lights. Know the kind I mean? they blink one light at a time and you can adjust the speed. He liked 'em blinking FAST!!!! It looked like we had a festive neighborhood, next to a used car lot!!!! I drove by recently and he now has icicle lights. Smart move..... Frank P.S. Oops, I just realized I'm a guest, musta tossed my Christmas cookies.... |
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18 Dec 00 - 10:52 PM (#359562) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Gypsy Me hats off to you Bernard! You sound like my better half. Personally, for the 3$ that they cost on sale, if a string don't work, i toss it. And for the public opinion poll: I love lights! So pretty at a dark time of the year. |
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18 Dec 00 - 11:08 PM (#359569) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Mark Cohen I'm just glad I'm Jewish and get to enjoy the decorations without having to put them up myself! When I was a kid we would go on a drive around our neighborhood and out into the near northern Philadelphia suburbs each December to look at Christmas lights. Even though we didn't celebrate the holiday it was still fun to look at all the lights, including the houses who were trying to be Disneyland East. My sister and I would play a game, each seeing how many lit Christmas trees we could count from our side of the car. The best thing was to find a house where somebody had draped lights on a long row of evergreen bushes, so you could call out all at once: "fortythreefortyfourfortyfivefortysixfortysevenfortyeightfortyninefifty...!" Aloha, Mark |
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18 Dec 00 - 11:25 PM (#359578) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: ddw I don't have much truck with Christmas, but I have to admit a house tastefully decorated can be beautiful — especially in as much snow as we have right now. The problem in Windsor is that about five years ago the whole city seemed to started a competition of decorating for each season — Halloween gets pretty strange and Easter is positively STUPID, with plastic colored eggs hanging off trees alll over the place — and the rule for Christmas seems to "more is better." Some neighborhoods are getting as ugly as the strip in Vegas, the Ginza in Tokyo or Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, Ont. I put a wreath on the house between the living room and dining room windows, lights on a tree inside and lights in the cedar roping on the mantle and bannisters. Wouldn't bother with that if the Yorkshire Tornado didn't insist on it for the grandkids. Happy Humbug, folks. David |
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18 Dec 00 - 11:33 PM (#359582) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Troll A simple menorah in the window. That takes care of The Memsahib and the Heir. I light a candle in my cave. troll |
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19 Dec 00 - 04:04 AM (#359658) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: GUEST * ON LINE CHRISTMAS LIGHT SCHEMES * A little SLOW loading but worth the wait!
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30 Aug 01 - 09:59 AM (#538074) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Rt Revd Sir jOhn from Hull |
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30 Aug 01 - 10:05 AM (#538077) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Rt Revd Sir jOhn from Hull Sorry evrybody, I didnt mean to refresh this, I have just bought a mouse and I an still getting used to it (I am using internet tv).If I put the pointing thing at the bottom of the screen,it scrolls down really fast and I pressed the wrong button.sorry.john |
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30 Aug 01 - 10:28 AM (#538095) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: Kim C Hey, it's almost September, which means that if the stores don't have their Christmas stuff out yet, they will REAL soon! Anyway, my lights always work. Of course, my tree is only 2 ft tall, because I had to have something that the animals couldn't destroy. I leave the lights and the tinsel on the tree and just pack it up that way. When I get it out in December, all I have to do is fluff up the little branches and put the ornaments on it. I have used the same string of lights for the last ten years. HOWEVER we did have to throw some others out because they didn't work... |
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30 Aug 01 - 11:51 AM (#538166) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: SharonA In a nearby neighborhood, there is one of THOSE houses that sports Christmas decorations of every sort: tree lights; house lights; lights strung between house and trees; lighted wire reindeer; painted wooden cut-out-and-stand-up figures covering the lawn, animated dolls (elves, Santa and the missus) in little booths to protect them from the weather; a giant lawn-menorah; outdoor speakers blaring Christmas music; and a HUGE scary-looking two-and-a-half-story snowman beside the house. Some of the decorations stay up all year, like the lights, the booths and THAT SNOWMAN. They bring in a truck with a cherry-picker in autumn to decorate (and change bulbs, presumably), then pound stakes into the ground for the wooden figures before the ground freezes. Slowly, weekend by weekend, they add more items till December; then they turn on the lights and stop traffic for the month. There's a wooden box on a pole near the sidewalk to take DONATIONS from anyone who cares to contribute to the garishness!!! And, of course, most of the decor stays up through the winter until it's warm enough outside to put some of the things away. It's certainly a neigborhood "attraction", but I'd hate to be one of their neighbors! As an apartment dweller, I use lights inside sometimes (I don't always get the big tree up!) but not to decorate the windows. What I like to do for the windows is to take decorative flags with holiday designs, and hang them from tension bars (placed between the window-sash and the mini-blinds). Not only does the outdoor observer see something Christmas-y (especially in the evening with the house-lights on), but indoors I get to look at something cheerier than the leafless trees through the window! |
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30 Aug 01 - 12:59 PM (#538214) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: GUEST,Nick On my way home from work I pass a pair of houses that go to war during the holidays. You can tell they are trying to out do each other. The baby Jesus with the iluminated rocket launcher aimed at the neighbor's house is a clue! They warfare spills over to Haloween and Easter as well! |
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30 Aug 01 - 02:20 PM (#538275) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: gnu Jesus Christ. That's why the globe is warming ! Well, I'm not going to be part of it. Not since the ex took all of the decorations, lights and the fake tree. Her apartment must look like Sears ! |
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30 Aug 01 - 03:06 PM (#538311) Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Tree Lights From: SharonA GUEST,Nick: Are you sure that was a rocket launcher? Remember, the baby Jesus would've been in the manger before the date of his circumcision! (Might be that you saw a different kind of "head" from a warhead...) |