General > General Technical Chat
LED Christmas lights - love 'em or hate 'em?
AlbertL:
I think that with many of us who decorate for Christmas, our tastes are most influenced by what we saw as children. I was born in 1957, so I grew up with incandescent Christmas lights, mostly C7 and C9 bulbs, and the miniature bulbs which came along later.
A few years ago, trying to be "green" and modern, I bought some multicolored LED light strings for the evergreen hedge along my front sidewalk, replacing the multicolored translucent C7 incandescents I'd been using. But right from the start, they seemed cold and not very "Christmas-y". It was several things: the highly-saturated colors, the purple which isn't a traditional Christmas light color, the odd light distribution, and their overall dimness.
I tolerated the LEDs for a couple of years, hoping I'd get used to them, but I finally realized they just weren't going to work. I replaced them with incandescent strings that I custom-configured with alternating clear and transparent red 5W C7 lamps spaced at 12". The difference was amazing - the cheerful, warm and bright Christmas lights that I'd loved since childhood were back!
Cerebus:
I'm a traditionalist, it doesn't feel like Christmas unless I've spent at least half an hour trying to find which bulb on the string is bust, and another half hour trying to find where I left the spare bulbs.
Alex Eisenhut:
Funny, the City is at this very moment installing super bright LED Christmas lights on a pole right outside my window... :palm:
james_s:
I've been an early adopter of most LED lighting and have been pleased with it but LED Christmas lights just have not lived up and I went completely back to incandescent, vintage C9 outside, C6 on the tree and miniature for other things. The LED lights are almost all too dim, the colors are bland and not the most pleasant, some are downright sickly looking. there is a wide variation in brightness from color to color, and the worst part is that they almost all are half wave self rectified and flicker very noticeably, at least to my eyes. On top of all that they don't last worth a crap. One of the big advantages of LED lighting is normally the long life, but out of the maybe 2 dozen strings of LED holiday lights I've had most of them started getting dead bulbs within a couple of seasons, some after just a week or so of use. I have incandescent lights that are ~30-70 years old that still works, on the indoor stuff it's rare that more than a lamp or two burns out in a season, they last longer than the LEDs which I think are just overdriven in attempt to get reasonable brightness out of cheap crap 20mA LEDs. Given the relatively low amount of use and the fact that they're used in the winter when the extra heat in the house is usually welcome I'll just stick to the warm, classic, flicker free glow of incandescent lamps.
Homer J Simpson:
Christmas Vacation scene.
https://youtu.be/iXaw70X7wb4
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