I've decided to share my failed moonlight project with the rest of you because house fires are no laughing matter.
It's the time of the season where inexpensive Christmas lights are easy to find. I've seen others making moonlights out of blue xmas light strings attached to the inside of their light strips, and I'm sure many more people will try it this year. There is probably no safety concerns when using brand new outdoor lights but take it from me, cutting and otherwise altering the light string in anyway is a bad idea.
My dog had pulled my xmas lights off my trees and chewed them up. So instead of throwing the "dog" in the garbage
I decided to make the mangled up light string into a moonlight. I cut off all the bad lights and wires and rewired in 4 lights that didn't happen to be chewed. I soldered and taped up all the connections and amazingly it worked great!... For about 15 min.
15 min later the lights started to flicker and shut off one by one. After there was only 1 light still on I unplugged it and started to pull the works out of the light strip only to burn myself on one of the LED bases. All I can figure is the other 25 lights in the string shared the power load, and no I'm not an electrician.
Here's a video I made 10 minutes before the problems started happening.
Ignore the feeder goldfish.
Since embedding only works 0.5% of the time here's a link as well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr1Bzbvz3JY
[YT]<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nr1Bzbvz3JY?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nr1Bzbvz3JY?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>[/YT]
It's the time of the season where inexpensive Christmas lights are easy to find. I've seen others making moonlights out of blue xmas light strings attached to the inside of their light strips, and I'm sure many more people will try it this year. There is probably no safety concerns when using brand new outdoor lights but take it from me, cutting and otherwise altering the light string in anyway is a bad idea.
My dog had pulled my xmas lights off my trees and chewed them up. So instead of throwing the "dog" in the garbage
I decided to make the mangled up light string into a moonlight. I cut off all the bad lights and wires and rewired in 4 lights that didn't happen to be chewed. I soldered and taped up all the connections and amazingly it worked great!... For about 15 min.15 min later the lights started to flicker and shut off one by one. After there was only 1 light still on I unplugged it and started to pull the works out of the light strip only to burn myself on one of the LED bases. All I can figure is the other 25 lights in the string shared the power load, and no I'm not an electrician.
Here's a video I made 10 minutes before the problems started happening.
Ignore the feeder goldfish.
Since embedding only works 0.5% of the time here's a link as well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr1Bzbvz3JY
[YT]<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nr1Bzbvz3JY?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nr1Bzbvz3JY?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>[/YT]
