As we reach the end of November,
many of us get out the decorations and fa la la la la and whatnot.
I’m certainly no exception, especially when it comes to lighting.
Why exactly do we litter our homes with light bulbs ‘round Christmas time?
Don’t know, but it’s probably marketing.
By golly it worked on me, though,
and as a lighting enthusiast generally the opportunity to put hundreds of little light bulbs
on railings and windows and shrubs and trees and stuff is just impossible to pass up.
But as you may very well know, I have a problem with the Christmas lighting industry.
And that problem is LEDs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love LEDs!
The light emitting diode is one of the most important inventions of the last however many years.
And some LED Christmas lights are great!
But multi-colored LED Christmas lights usually aren’t.
Rather than look festive and cheery and bright,
modern LED Christmas light sets usually make it look like a gaming PC exploded on your front lawn.
If that aesthetic tickles your fancy,
I will judge you but I won’t get in your way.
Have fun.
But for the past several years I have been on a foolish quest to determine the best way to make modern LED Christmas lights
look like old-fashioned incandescent Christmas lights.
Luckily, some much-more-commited-than-me folks started up Tru-Tone
and now manufacture incredibly excellent LED versions of C7 and C9 bulbs.
They are virtually indistinguishable from their energy-sucking incandescent counterparts
and if that’s something you’re looking for, you should check them out.
They’re not paying me to say that, I bought these with my own money
but they are exactly what I’ve been hoping somebody would do
and if you live in North America (and are the same kind of weirdo I am) I think you’ll be more than pleased with them.
However, Tru-Tone has not yet made inroads on tackling the mini-light problem.
So here we go again.
To explain what my problem is,
in ye-olden days we made light happen by making tiny bits of tungsten wire very very hot.
Hot things produce light through incandescence,
and when it’s hot enough a whole bunch of wavelengths of light will be emitted which together look white.
When we wanted to make that look a color other-than-white,
we’d add a coating to the glass of the light bulb which acted to filter out most wavelengths aside from our target color.
The result was a sort of blend of wavelengths that produced a pleasing (if reduced in brightness) appearance.
LEDs, on the other hand, only emit a single wavelength of light
which depends on the materials used to create it.
That monochromatic light has an incredibly intense color because it is literally pure as can be -
it’s like the color wheel picker on your image editing app.
A perfectly pure hue.
Some of you may like this.
Even I like it at times.
But for Christmas lights?
It’s just wrong.
Especially greens and blues - that is not a warm and fuzzy looking festive display,
it’s a tacky storefront with those chasing LED strips around the windows letting you know they have CBD oil.
I’m sorry, that’s just the truth!
If the blue and the green could be toned down a bit,
I’d probably be a little less grumpy about this.
A large part of why LED multicolored sets and incandescent multi-colored sets look so starkly different
is that the filament in an incandescent light doesn’t produce a whole lot of the green-to-blue wavelengths
(that would require getting tungsten into melty temperatures and those bulbs wouldn’t last long at all).
So, through pure physics reasons the blue and green will appear quite a lot darker than reds, oranges, and especially yellows.
A multi-colored LED set that just mimicked those relative brightness ratios would be a huge improvement.
There are reasons that’s difficult, though.
Something something voltage drop, gallium nitride, et cetera.
But there’s another way:
through lots of innovation involving phosphor coatings excited by blue to near-UV diodes,
we’ve made extremely good and reasonably broad-band white LEDs that are quite cheap.
So, why don’t we just make a whole bunch of white diodes and put a colored cap over them a la the way we used to do it?
Then we could have the best of both worlds!
Just to make sure that hasn’t happened yet and, side note,
somebody please just do it so I can end this!
I went to a couple of big box stores to see what their big boxes had in store.
The first thing of note:
Europe is invading!
Traditionally, light sets over here just have raw mains voltage going through them.
A set of 100 mini-lights will actually have two runs of 50 bulbs wired in series.
The bulbs are rated for somewhere near 2.5 volts and with them all in series that adds up to 125 volts
(the bulbs actually fail as a short circuit which keeps the rest of the strand lit…
usually… so they build some margin in for that).
C9 and C7 sets supply straight line voltage to each bulb socket which, fun fact,
is why those sets have polarized plugs and mini-light sets don’t.
This is a note to editor me, make sure you put that little asterisk in there about how some older C7 and C9 sets were also in series.
Did you do it?
Good!
Now, though, LED light strands that come with little power adapters that make some flavor of not-line-voltage are starting to become available.
And new form factors, too!
Most LED sets have been mimicking the shape of incandescent lights but now we have so-called “rice lights” -
and these have some built-in chasing functions to make things interesting.
And then there’s these “ribbon lights” which seem to be a play on LED tape light but with diodes in little blobs.
Both of these are intriguing,
though I must say that ribbon light doesn’t look too durable,
but sadly the multi-colored sets still look like something a unicorn threw up so I had to pass.
Also interesting, some of the “traditional” LED sets for sale are starting to come with non-replaceable bulbs.
To be honest, this annoyed me at first.
But I’ve come around to this probably being better.
Until this year, every one of these sets I’ve seen has technically had replaceable bulbs
but they were made just like the incandescent sets of the past.
In fact, it was often the legs of the LED bent around the bulb holder just like the tiny wire leads of the incandescent mini-lights.
Corrosion was a major problem there, plus the bulbs could sometimes end up falling out which would kill the whole strand,
so sealing the whole thing up is likely going to make the set more durable in the long-run.
Alas, when it came to the colors,
everything was either “decent warm white” or “shield your eyes multi-colored”
so it’s time yet again to try my luck at figuring out how to make these less awful.
Here’s a summary of things I’ve tried in the past.
Sharpies: worked great but quickly faded in the sun and/or rain.
Spray paint: didn’t work at all.
Acrylic craft paint: didn’t work at all.
Transparent acrylic craft paint: worked surprisingly well!
Durability testing didn’t happen, though, because I forgot.
Nail polish: another surprise hit!
Probably the easiest of all and durability was probably decent but again actual testing didn’t happen because I forgot.
But that’s all I’ve tried so far.
At least I think.
Wait - I forgot about the Rit dye:
That also didn’t work.
The heat from the dying process made the lights get all bendy, too.
Surely there’s something better out there.
And for your viewing pleasure and my sense of ennui,
it’s time to once again test some light bulb painting techniques.
On the docket today are epoxy resin and dyes for said epoxy resin,
then we have a twist on acrylic craft paint involving some water and glue,
and finally we have a mystery third thing.
Stay tuned for that one. It worked pretty good!
I started this year’s shenanigans with epoxy resin.
I ordered some and some dyes for it and thought “this might work OK.”
But a thought is not the same as an experiment,
and I don’t have room for thought experiments.
Anyway so I mixed some up, added some dye to it, and hoped for the best.
I started with blue because this is the trickiest color - I want a nice deep blue, so it needs to have quite a lot of dye.
But go too far and it might be black.
Turns out that wasn’t a problem here.
Despite adding quite a lot of dye to the resin, the mixture added hardly any color in the thin skim-coating that I knew I’d need.
And this is something that I need to touch on -
in all my attempts here, people are (quite helpfully) suggesting things I should try
but a lot of the suggestions I’ve received turn out to have nowhere near as much color as I need.
Things like stained glass paint or colored heat shrink tubing just aren’t dark enough -
the glass of an unlit incandescent set looks nearly black on all colors but yellow or amber.
So if this was gonna work, I’d need way more dye.
After adding way more dye,
I was starting to get worried that there would be too much dye for the resin to cure properly.
But there was only one way to find out.
After making the concoction so dark as to appear black, things looked promising at first but then quickly became the opposite of that.
Test-dunks revealed just how tricky the balance is here between too dark and not dark enough -
the light goes from hardly visible to just right to too pale in a matter of moments.
Add to this the general difficulty of getting the coating thickness I wanted
(this resin was extremely runny and even after waiting over an hour, despite thickening quite a bit, it would still run off eventually)
and epoxy was ruled out completely.
My next trick was to try the milk glass coating I stumbled upon through sheer dumb luck.
I got these table lamps from the Swedish meatball place last year and while they are pretty cool looking,
having bare light bulbs in your peripheral vision kind of sucks
so I wanted to frost the glass.
But not frost it like the translucent kind of frosting, but the opaque white kind of frosting,
and there weren’t any good guides on how to do this so I just tried equal parts (by weight) water, white craft paint, and PVA glue
and by golly it worked perfectly!
The lamps still look great, no cracking or yellowing,
and if you’re interested in learning more about this process you can check out the video on Connextras.
I thought I would try this technique for Christmas lights but using colored paint instead of just white.
So I mixed some up, dunked the bulbs, and thought that perhaps I had cracked it!
But then the coating cracked.
Yeah, not sure if it’s because it was on plastic or what but the coating shrank and cracked and generally didn’t hold up.
I also tried just half glue and half paint
(the water made the mixture a little runnier than I think I wanted)
but this also didn’t dry well.
Again, I started with blue and since both of those two techniques didn’t work I promptly gave up.
Even if this had worked well, it still had that frosted look which I would have accepted
but wasn’t exactly what I was going for.
So, back to the drawing board.
The absolute best end-result I have gotten so far came from transparent craft paint.
But, it was fiddly and annoying to apply.
I mean, let’s be real, this whole endeavor is objectively ridiculous.
I am a ridiculous person who is committed to the bit, but if I’m gonna keep doing this I want something just a little bit easier.
But then I noticed that one of my bottles of paint - the yellow one that’s been sitting on the shelves behind me for what, two years now? -
says “Airbrush colors” on it.
Now, I’ve never had a need for an airbrush
(usually I use a comb)
but if that’s what it’s designed for maybe an airbrush would help.
So I got one!
Did I just search on Amazon for “airbrush kit” and buy the most obvious one?
Yep!
Do I really know how to use an airbrush?
Nope!
Did that stop me?
Nope!
But having the airbrush is only one part of the problem.
The other was how to hold the lights to make airbrushing possible.
Now, as I’ve discussed previously,
I really don’t care for many of the color combinations on offer today.
My preference is a simple four-color palette of red, green, blue, and yellow.
I will accept amber or orange in place of yellow,
but teals and purples and pinks are completely unacceptable because those are Easter colors and that comes later.
Those colors do not belong in Christmas light sets!
Capiche?
As luck would have it, the very four colors I wanted were available in a set of transparent airbrush paint.
I bought new paint just in case the old paint was going bad, and that yellow bottle was already separating two years ago so it’s much worse now.
And if for whatever reason I were to change my mind about color preferences,
different colors could be made by mixing these primary colors together.
Just ask your kindergarten teacher!
So, knowing that I’d be spraying a strand of one hundred mini lights
in my objectively correct preference of red, yellow, green, and blue,
I took a spare piece of cardboard from one of those Amazon boxes
and used a single hole punch to make 26 holes along its edge.
Then I taped over one of them because I only needed 25.
And I meticulously poked every fourth light through those holes
and then taped some printer paper to the edges of the piece of cardboard to protect the rest of the set from overspray.
Then I picked this gravity-fed airbrush from my airbrush kit because that would probably work,
shook up the blue paint bottle, put some paint in the cup,
and went at it.
And by golly, it worked!
It worked greatly!
The blue paint was actually a perfect color,
the airbrush made applying it nearly effortless,
and after a couple of coats it was exactly what I was looking for.
Of course the only thing left to do was let it dry,
clean out the airbrush,
then pull out all the now blue bulbs and shove another quarter of them through the holes to prepare for the next color.
Then repeat.
This was still a pretty fiddly process,
but it’s definitely the least fiddly of any I’ve tried.
In fact the primary fiddle factor was dealing with the light-holding rig while untangling and wrangling and retangling the rest of the strand.
If I were to do this again,
I would try to find a better way to hold them.
Maybe a large piece of cardboard with holes made by a drill press or something could tackle five strands at a time -
though how to keep them organized would be quite the question.
And the end results, while pretty great, still reveal a few flaws.
For one, I had forgotten that the last time I used these paints the yellow was very much a highlighter yellow
and it benefitted from adding a bit of red to warm it up.
I should have done that again.
This red is also not quite transparent - interestingly I found the same thing last time with this different brand of transparent model paint
so my guess is it’s an inherent issue with red pigmenting.
Another thing to consider is that apparently this paint benefits from heat treatment.
Whether that can be safely done without melting the plastic caps I don’t know.
I didn’t try and I’m not going to.
This year, I am going to actually put this strand outside where it will be exposed both to the Southern sun and the
just lovely weather we get around here.
I’ll report back on its durability on the second channel - so maybe subscribe there if you haven’t.
I’ll try to do one of those community posts too.
Now, you might ask,
“why are you doing this to yourself?” and my response would be
“that’s an excellent question.”
Broadly, I just want to show that this can be done!
Yes, maybe I’m just a curmudgeon who’s out of touch,
but I really would like to use LED multicolored lighting ‘round the holidays because incandescent light sets use a stupid amount of power!
Last year my power bill doubled for the month of December merely because I had two C9 sets
and I wanna say six runs of twinkling lights running for 8 hours a night.
That’s ridiculous, especially considering I have an electric car!
But all the multicolored strands on the market today still look like gamer vomit
and that’s just not something I want all over my home at any time but especially not the holidays!
And there’s good news out of the UK!
A viewer got in touch and sent me pictures of a light strand that is EXACTLY what I’m asking for.
It’s a set very much like this one but where the diodes are all a nice warm white
and its coloring comes from the plastic caps that define the shape of the pseudo-bulb.
In this case, I think the coloring might not be quite as strong as I’d like -
I worry this is more of a pastel color theme than the rich colors I’m looking for.
But it shows somebody could make this if they just tried.
So, one of you in charge of ordering all those lights from whatever factories overseas make them,
maybe try and steer things in this direction.
And to the folks at Tru-Tone - you could be those people!
I will be incredibly happy if I can just... buy these
and not go through this nonsense just to get some semblance of the things I’m looking for.
And if somebody finally manages to make this a thing I can get in stores with all the other holiday stuff...
you all had better buy them! Ok?
I don’t want to find out that the gross blue-green laser beam lights are actually what you people want!
I will be so disappointed and you’ll never hear the end of it, I promise.
Happy holidays!
♫ Unexpectedly Christmas Jazz ♫
But, multicolored [ ] LED
I should have them ready to demonstrate.
Modern LED christmas light sets usually make it…
what happened there?
What did you get caught on, you terrible thing?
…mimicked the relative brightness ratios would be…
crap.
I changed the tense of something for no reason [clears throat]
Different colors could be made by mixing these primary colors together.
Justk ask your [ppfttah!]
Different colors could be made by mixing these primary colors together.
Just ask your tche…
why am I struggling with that?
[a jazz rendition of We Wish You A Merry Christmas fades back in]
Now look at all those pretty twinkling lights.
Devastatingly, I think Menards has discontinued them.
Now I don't feel so bad about hoarding them these last few years.