Buying Christmas (Winter-solstice Celebration) Lights

MichaelLC

We're getting a real tree this year, so need lights. Pretty minor question, but hard to find any reliable reviews on-line.

Looking for some buying advice - particularly any to look for or any to avoid with a 1-year old. Are LEDs worth the extra cost? Any brand better than the others? Thanks!

iRevert

Last year I switched over to all LED lights, cost of running was negligible at best as I wasn't running that many strings. Biggest perk was they run cool as can be which is a good selling point I think.

If you plan on running a ton of strings of lights LED will save you some money, 3 or 4 strings not so much.

I think the brand I have is GE but I can't confirm until I dig them out.

Foomy

LED lights also don't have the problem that most normal light strings have where if one bulb burns out half your string goes dead and you have to spend hours going down the line checking them all. May god help you if you have more than one dead light on a string with the non-led ones, easier to just buy new lights at that point.

You can also get some nifty colour changing strings and such with LED, that you can't do on normal lights.

Dhalphir

LEDs are worth it alone for the fact that you don't lose the whole string if one light dies.

Nosf

LEDs last forever, are cool to the touch, the colours are generally richer and yeah, if one did somehow go bad you don't spend a day sorting out which it is.

BlazeFire

Er, couldn't you get non-LED strings that were wired in parallel? We had them when I was younger.

saint2e

If you're going for coloured lights, I would highly advise the LED ones. We've purchased coloured non-LED ones the past few years, and their colour fades and eventually they all become white anyways.

Perhaps it's the brand we purchased, but regardless, when we get new lights, they'll be LED.

Foomy

BlazeFire wrote: »

Er, couldn't you get non-LED strings that were wired in parallel? We had them when I was younger.

Very hard to find anymore, with the swtich to LED the only brands left of normal strings are generally the cheaper ones, and those don't bother spending the extra money/manufacturing time to make them parallel. Even before LED lights were a thing getting the good parallel strings was hard.