I'm embarrassed to sound like I'm pitching a product here, but in the spirit of the holidays I have to share this. I'm in awe of a tool I bought today called the Light Keeper Pro, for diagnosing and fixing Christmas light strings. If your chores include fixing light strings, this is a must-have tool. You can find You-Tube demo videos, and they're legit.
I bought the tool to find the bulbs that make the string go dark. I've done this chore for years with a DMM and I'm quite good at it, but it's annoying and tedious, especially once the lights are hung. I read the patent for this tool, and was intrigued to read that it includes a high-gain inverter to detect the small electric field of a "hot" string versus a dead portion, with no direct contact. No more pulling bulbs with my thumbnails! Where the transitions are, from hot to cold, indicates where the bad bulbs are. Clever, and I considered making such a thing myself. As a guitar player I figured, how hard can it be to detect 60-cycle hum? Hard not to. For $20 locally, I'm glad I didn't bother.
I guess it finds bad bulbs OK with its field detector, but the amazing thing is that this tool generates a piezoelectric zap that actually repairs the open shunts of bad bulbs, allowing the string to light up. And it really works; I pulled the trigger all of three times tonight and repaired three dead strings quick as that. Once they light again, it's easy to replace the bulbs that are out.
I never got around to using the field detector for scanning the strings for the bad bulbs, since I was able to light them all up by zapping them instead. The instructions make it clear that searching for the offending bulbs is the last resort, to be done only after using the zapper until there's no hope that more zapping will fix the string.
I bought the tool to find the bulbs that make the string go dark. I've done this chore for years with a DMM and I'm quite good at it, but it's annoying and tedious, especially once the lights are hung. I read the patent for this tool, and was intrigued to read that it includes a high-gain inverter to detect the small electric field of a "hot" string versus a dead portion, with no direct contact. No more pulling bulbs with my thumbnails! Where the transitions are, from hot to cold, indicates where the bad bulbs are. Clever, and I considered making such a thing myself. As a guitar player I figured, how hard can it be to detect 60-cycle hum? Hard not to. For $20 locally, I'm glad I didn't bother.
I guess it finds bad bulbs OK with its field detector, but the amazing thing is that this tool generates a piezoelectric zap that actually repairs the open shunts of bad bulbs, allowing the string to light up. And it really works; I pulled the trigger all of three times tonight and repaired three dead strings quick as that. Once they light again, it's easy to replace the bulbs that are out.
I never got around to using the field detector for scanning the strings for the bad bulbs, since I was able to light them all up by zapping them instead. The instructions make it clear that searching for the offending bulbs is the last resort, to be done only after using the zapper until there's no hope that more zapping will fix the string.
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