Christmas light wonder

[Lee Schierer]

You know how you buy those miniature light strings for the tree and the house and after the first year one or more of the strings won't light!!! You then spend hours changing out one bulb at a time until you find a dead one.

Well, my daughter asked me to help her with putting up her lights last weekend and sure enough several of the strings were dead. But, she had purchased a brand fangled new tester fixer for lights (yeah sure right, the only thing it will fix is the bank account of the vendor I thought as I opened the package.) Well, would you believe this thing actually did what it said. You take a dead string, plug it in the wall, pull out one light bulb at the end of the string. Plug that open socket into the receptacle on the fixer tool and pull the trigger up to 20 times. Usually by the second or third trigger pull the lights would blink. When that happens, put the removed bulb back in the socket and that section of the string lights up just like new except for the burned out bulbs.

IT REALLY WORKS. This thing was amazing. Out of 10 non-working strings we ended up with all 10 working. One string was sacrificed to provide replacement bulbs for the burned out bulbs.

http://images.homeandbeyond.com/prod-0001100-prod.jpg

[Dave Lehnert]

I have sold that thing for years at the store but got to use one last year.
It is an item you have to use to believe.

[Leigh Costello]

We buy one nearly every year. Somehow, it gets loaned out and the next year we buy another. Not gonna loan out the next one!

[Peter Luch]

That is sooo funny as my son and I just spent over an hour doing the light swap thing :mad:

Gonna go get one!!!

Aloha, Pete

[Chris Damm]

My brother who puts up about 40 strings at his tavern swears by it. He would spend hours fixing lights every year until his wife bought him one of those.

[Ken Higginbotham]

OK... Somebody has to figure out and explain how it works :mad:

[Lee Schierer]

OK... Somebody has to figure out and explain how it works :mad:

I believe they have a piezoelectric crystal in it like the kind you use to start a gas grill. The high voltage spike from the crystal fuses the small wire loop inside the bulb that is supposed to short circuit the leads inside the bulb when the filament fails. By fusing the link the bulb is now a closed circuit instead of an open one and the string will light up once all the open circuits are closed. Each click of the trigger sends one pulse so pulling it several times welds several bulbs. It won't fix strings with damaged or missing bulbs.

[Ken Higginbotham]

I'll be darn. That's pretty cool...