Johannes Stauffer says:

Faulty Wiring, Unremovable Lights For those of you who don’t want to read the rant, here’s a quick breakdown:Pros: (if they worked)-Bright, vibrant colors-8 blinker settings (one of which is just all on, no blinking)-No AC/DC power converter (compared to Bethlehem Lighting LED Christmas lights, among others)Cons:-Extremely poor wiring caused dangerous electrical shorts which burned out all the red and yellow lights on one strand (and could have burned someone or started a fire)-No female plug on terminal end–you can’t string these lights together-Every light is soldered and heat-shrunk directly onto the strand (no sockets), meaning light replacement would be prohibitively difficult and time consuming for the average person-Blinker control box forgets last setting when power is removed, and defaults to demo cycle-through-every-blinky-setting mode. It also seems to have a mind of its own and occasionally decides to switch to a blinking mode after hours of behaving nicely.-Indoor onlySo here’s the story:I set out to buy myself some LED Christmas lights this year in hopes of avoiding the shattered glass and constant searching for dead bulbs that comes with traditional incandescent Christmas lights. I figured, even if they’re more expensive, it’ll even out in a year when I don’t throw out all my Christmas lights and buy new ones out of frustration. I was, it would seem, sadly mistaken.After digging through Amazon sellers and countless Christmas decoration and LED wholesalers for an hour, I arrived at these lights and as the best value for my dollar–at least on paper. When they arrived, these lights stood out as considerably better than the Bethlehem Lighting set (which arrived with the blinker control box already broken, but wasn’t worth the shipping cost to return). However, without that failure of a product to compare them to, these lights wouldn’t even have warranted the two stars I so generously gave.When the lights arrived, I only plugged them in briefly to make sure they worked, so it wasn’t until I started decorating a few weeks later that I discovered that these strands don’t have a female plug on the terminal end, so you can’t string them together. Not a huge problem, but a bit of an oversight, considering Christmas lights have had that feature for longer than I’ve been alive. I also found that the push-button blinker control at the end of the strand is extremely poorly constructed and also fails to retain its settings, so it sometimes–but not always–reverts to blinky demo mode when turned off and on again, and sometimes does so at random after having been on for several minutes. These were minor annoyances, however, in comparison to my next issue.As I hung the lights around the periphery of my apartment windows, I noticed that they felt quite hot in places. I found that odd, as LEDs should give off very little heat, if any. I soon found that they were so hot in places that one could easily receive second-degree burns from brief contact. I unplugged them and decided to examine them more closely. Further inspection showed that all of the red and yellow lights on the strand were extremely hot beneath the heat shrink tubing at the base of each diode–either from poor construction causing a short, or perhaps a faulty resistor (I never bothered to cut away the insulation to see if they’re wired that way or not)–and, when I decided to plug them in once more to do some exploring with a multimeter, I found that the red and yellow lights would no longer light. Fantastic.Unfortunately, since I tried to be on top of my game this year and bought my lights early, by the time their glaring faults came to light I was well outside the minuscule return period afforded by the seller. Of the two strands of this type that I bought, one is completely dead (and wouldn’t have been safe to use anyway) and the other works intermittently and gets warm but not dangerously hot (yet).Thankfully, I learned of a sale at Lowes where I was able to buy 50-light strands of GE brand LED Christmas lights (with a three-year warranty and all the usual ‘features’) for three dollars apiece. Very nice.At any rate, that took a lot of words to say “Don’t buy these crappy lights.” Thanks for reading all the way through.

Porcelain Monkey says:

Do you gamble? Having read the reviews, and being aware of the way the lights don’t change color but still you could change the pattern and all the other variables, I bought them. The lights are pretty and bright- just stuck on an annoying epileptic seizure inducing pattern. the important thing was I forgot about “made in China” it should be “low quality from China” I wont go into what “Made in China” used to mean when I was growing up- We really dont have a choice anymore on things like this.the controller for changing the lights did not work right out of the box- inspector 34 missed this one. I am sending it back and warning others not to waste their money.