"No word on the pros and cons of candles vs LEDs in manorahs."

It's what Jesus would do.

This is why I spent the money last year to buy 10 sets of LED lights, even without having a apartment yet.

That is NOT my experience. And I have purchased over 6000 LED christmas lights.

The ones that are socketed? They corrode from the inside out. Why? They inappropriately mix copper electrical wiring with the aluminum leads that come out of the LEDs themselves. Really. They rust from the inside out, and stop working. Quite visible. Problem apparent after a single season.

The ones that are not socketed? When an LED bulb burns out, you can't replace it. But what, these are supposed to last millions of years or something, right? Wrong. Especially when you have lots of them. (And some colors seem to burn out quicker than others, like the blue.) Go for two or three seasons, and you'll have quite a number of burnt out bulbs. No, they don't choose the top of the line long-life expensive LEDs for christmas lights. What, are you surprised?

LEDs generally get dimmer as they get older. The white ones are the worst, because they act like a fluorescent light. They are actually ultraviolet LEDs that shine against a phosporescent coating on the outside of the bulb.

Many manufacturers (again, to save money) allow for some variance in the color of the LEDs. If you get give blue strands, some may be blue-green. Some may be purple.

I have so many LED strands, it is crazy. But these things are NOT an investment to save money. They will NOT last you for 10 seasons. You will have a very hard time breaking even on costs.

I had LED lights on my tree last year and I have to say that it didn't quite have the same feel to it. They weren't as bright and the colour wasn't what I was used to.

I could probably have dealt with the colour if the brightness had been there.

@mantari: Sorry, I do not agree with the last statement, I have done better than "break even" with my LED Xmas light purchases.

4 years ago, I purchased 10 strands of Forever Bright lights on sale at Boscov's....for $4 a strand. I have used them from November until January every year, removing the lights in the off season. One strand had to become a donor unit, but so far, I've gotten to use 9 strands each year. A couple of years ago I purchased the Philips icicle lights and have had them up and on ALL year for two full years (We have the lights INSIDE porch frame and tuck up the icicle strands during the off season so as to not look like the trailer-park crowd). Obviosly I have gotten my money back and then some.

Basic Xmas lights that you buy for $2-$3 a strand do not last in weather. The LED lighting I got has nbetter connections that previous lights, and Ive had no problem with shorts or failures. Save two or three burnt bulbs on the Forever Bright, Ive had 0 issues. My time is more important than a few bucks anyway. If they lasted only 2 years, it would have been worth it.

I celebrate Festivus, so all I have is an unadorned aluminum pole.

If you bought LED strands before this year, it is safe to say you were an early adopter. That is great, but I suspect the sort of problems mentioned above have been addressed by now. At least, I hope so, because I replaced all my Christmas lights with LED ones this year, and I would hate to have the problems mentioned above. And, yes, I can deal with it not being quite as bright since I am not quite as bright myself.

@Lizard_King: And yet, we share something in common.

My Philips lights were also the 'icicle formation'. They rusted from the inside out. I'd be happy to provide pictures of several of the ~25-30 strands. The rust is very visible from the outside -- you don't even need to open up a socket to see them.

Guess what? Surprise! No warranty. If they don't last past the season, the problem is yours alone. The risk of these 'long life LED bulbs' is completely on you. The manufacturers do NOT back up their claims with ANY warranty. If Philips had offered a warranty, they'd be out the cost of 25-30 sets. They know what they're doing.

All it takes is water and air.

Actually, out of all of them, the Philips were the worst about rust... and also color consistency. But their newer models (which they stop socketing, I've heard... again.... "wonder why?") are better.

We still have two of the five strands of mini lights that we bought for our first Christmas as a married couple.

That was in 1972. And we paid less than $2 per strand.

When LEDs reach that level of durability...

@mantari: Ahhh, mine, being up under the porch might be better protected from the elements. I do live in the mid-atlantic area, so we get our share of wet and cold weather in the lighting season.

As for the discussion at hand, for color, yes the LED coloring and brightness are a bit "off", but In my case they worked better. My wife is VERY neurotic about fires and has to shut down the tree before leaving the room. She goes to the kitchen, tree goes off, comes back, tree goes back on (sometimes). This means I do not get to see the tree lit up when I am lazy. Also, she is not happy with the electrical bill around Xmas, so the savings we saw (you can't really measure, and probably offset from having some lights on year round) helped.

I prefer to see our colored LED lights outside though, as the "flicker" bothers me a bit. The Forever Bright lights have a high speed flicker that has to do with the AC to DC conversion.

@Galley: Ahh A Festivis for the rest of us.

long live the easter bunny
christmas is dead
I love my LED lights
'nuff said

My experience last year with LED lights was less than satisfactory. First off, the lights flickered like mad, just enough to be headache-inducing. Second, the lights were VERY bright (I bought the regular lights without frosted globes). When one light shined directly at me, it was bright enough to cause an afterimage and in more than one instance, a headache from the bright small point of light.
While I am loathe to spend the money for electricity, I think I will switch back to the old-fashioned warmth of regular lights this year.

(For some reason, this sentence disappeared from my just-posted comment)
The LEDs were bright enough that they threw points of light around the room like a flashlight or a disco ball.

We bought a couple of sets last year just to test them out. So far we were happy with them. We are waiting until next year to start replacing all of our outdoor lights in earnest. Since each year there seems to be more of the LED versions we figure next year there will be even more options.
I just wish more of the big box stores would start carrying the solar LED ones so we don't have to waste electricity from the grid.

There's just something so, so wrong about electric menorah. While arguably, oil is also used to generate electricity, the holiday is a celebration of the miracle of the oil itself.

That, plus it's just plain tacky. If you want a good menorah, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a nice selection, including an art deco brass menorah and a minimalist wrought iron menorah. Lenox also produces some very nice Judaica including several beautiful menorah.

If you live in an apartment on either the ground, second, or third floor, tradition states that you should have a menorah in a window facing the street. Obviously, if you live in a house, you should put a menorah in a ground floor window facing the street.

For window menorah, light the candles left to right (it will appear right to left for passers-by - kind of like hanging the field of blue on the flag on the right so that it appears on the left outside).

I'm a fan of LED's in general, so last year about this time I bought 5 sets of white LED Christmas lights from Home Depot ( $6 each ) and strung them around under my house in the carport ( stilt house - Florida Keys ) for an end of hurricane season party.
They gave the carport a nice, soft, even light and after measuring the energy usage (6 watts per 50 LED string, 30 watts for the whole set of 5 strings ) I decided to leave them up and light the carport with them, rather than the compact fluorescent bulb we had been using.
The Keys are a VERY corrosive environment, and I'm about a block from Florida Bay.
I have had NONE of the 300 fail in the last year of constant operation. The ones at the entrance of the carport which are in the sun in the afternoons are showing some yellowing of the plastic faceted "bulb", but other than than I'm very happy with them.

• LEDs were not brighter, but ran cooler-Did you know 14 people a year are killed as a result of Christmas tree fires?

I never trust the reasoning behind statements like this. How do you know one of those 14 killed by a christmas tree fire wasn't about to go out and kill 53 people? In that context, the christmas tree fire SAVED lives.

@infmom: Congrats on buying lights when they still had manufacturing quality. My parents had a set from the early-mid 80's that lasted at least 20 years before giving out and now it seems like any strand we get doesn't make it through more than two seasons.

I was shopping for trees the other day and the first thing I noticed was that LED lights lack the warm, glowing look of regular bulbs. I had always wanted LED lights on a tree, but after seeing 2 trees side by side with LED and regular bulbs, I bought the regular ones.

RE: Flickering

You have to carefully shop for them, but I was able to get a sets of LED christmas lights with 'full wave rectifiers'.

What causes the flickering in most sets is that half of a set is placed on a rectifier which feeds it electricity when the AC is on the positive half of the cycle. The other half of the set is on an inverse rectifier that feeds it electricity when the AC is on the negative half of the cycle. (They're put on opposite halves, in part, to produce a power factor that is more clean, rather than just eating up half of every cycle... that pollutes the mains).

But the result is that each individual bulb is energized and turned off 30 times per second. Result: flicker.

Some of the newer sets that use full wave rectifiers will power the bulb on the up cycle and the down cycle of AC current. the result is a flicker of 60 times per second, which turns out not to be noticable, even indoors.

I believe that it may be (abusive) patents that are standing in the way of all sets using them?

I believe, from memory, that the Forever Bright brand is flicker free? I could be wrong there.

I had some cool LED floodlights that worked on a completely different principle. They were also flicker free, but it was because they had a tiny built-in switching power supply. (Charges up a capacitor in the order of hundreds or thousands of time per second, in order to maintain a constant voltage.)

The only downside with those is that they didn't work very well with a dimmer. The circuitry compensated for the loss of input voltage and tried to maintain a constant output.

@rususeruru: That was probably when the strands were US made too.

"Did you know 14 people a year are killed as a result of Christmas tree fires?"

Any word on how many people per year are killed by menorah fires? [note the spelling: Menorah]

Technically our tree is already using all LED lighting because since 1990 we've collected every Star Trek and Star Wars Starship Light & Sound areornament starting with the original Enterprise.

Spaceships are my LED Christmas tree lights!
(Many, many spaceships!)

It's a very long process every year putting up and taking down, but man it looks awesome.
You should hear the cacophony when the tree is turned on!

@strider_mt2k: Strider, I wanta photogallery of that. Email me please!

I cant stand ANY of these new lights. I curse the day mini lights were made. I still own lots of giant C-9 bulbs for outside and C-7 and bubble lights for inside. None of these new lights are as good. LED lights are the worst. They flicker and unless youre looking at them from the top of the LED you dont get the brightness from them. Its like they are directional light instead of radiant light. As for hot lights. They dont start tree fires as proven by the Mythbusters when they put 1000 of the old C-7 bulbs on which is about 10 times as many as a normal person would use and even after a month of no water it still didnt burst into flames. Its usually shorts that cause fires.

@ideaman2020: The NFPA doesn't parse those specific stats out, but December is when the most candle fires happen. Many of the candle fires are decorative candles like scented votives.

While still potentially dangerous, Chanukah candles do not burn for an overlong time (usually a couple of hours) and are lit before dinner (sundown is before 5). They must not only be able to burn for 1/2 an hour after nightfall, on Shabbos, the Chanukah candles are lit before the Shabbos candles (which are lit 18 minutes before sundown).

Most candle fires happen because of candles left unattended. Candles left burning overnight account for 1/8 of candle fires. Unattended or abandoned candles account for 1/5 of candle fires. In other words, if you get home late during Chanukah, the first thing you should do is light the Menorah so that you don't have to stay up late until the candle burns out.

that's not really a good christmas-tree, but it could turn into a very interesting graveston-concept!!

@Brian Lam: For you?
No problemo!

ASAP man.

@scampy: Ditto on the praise for C-7s and C-9s. The point of putting lights on your house is to be seen and the only lights that truly cut it are C-7s and 9s. Ibuy every string I can on clearance from CVS and Target.

I've had blue led lights up in my room for over two years now. They rock! I even have them hooked up to a dimmer for funsies. I've never had a problem with a bulb burning out, or corrosion. But they make for great stop-action type effects in the dark!

LEDs are nice for kids because they aren't going to burn themselves on them. Plus there were comparable in price. I'm was always worried about my little ones touching the old bulbs that were burning hot, therefore before we had the LEDs we barely lit up our tree.

I find that LED lights have a much purer color than incandescent. Part of that is because so many stores sell only cheap incandescent sets (price being the number one driving factor). Regarding flicker, color variance, connections, light output and so forth -- we're just at the beginning of LED light sets. They'll certainly continue to improve year-to-year. I expect that they'll surpass incandescent quality quite soon.

Me, I have C9's on the house, commercial-grade minis outside, C7's on the tree, and have started switching to LED's for outside mini applications. Lower light output is offset by the fact that I can drive 10 times the number of strands for the same power (in reality I'll use 2-3 times as many).

Also intriguing is the possibility of driving strands with batteries at various points in the yard, rather than throwing line voltage everywhere.

Employing batteries to power LED strands is intriguing indeed. In fact, wouldn't a solar panel or two, together with a proper bank of rechargeable batteries, allow one to adorn one's yard and house with copious, colorful arrays of LEDs? Such an application is but one of many fledgling forays consumers at last may use to reduce, and perhaps ultimately remove, their dependency on their local electric utility.

i hate Christmas, threes and all these lights around the city. and the hell on streets
here also rains and uses to be hot
the hell

replaced all of my lights outside this year with leds. got most at walmart for 7/strand (60 leds). This is more expensive than their 2 dollar strands, but those 0are crap. It's amazing how cheap they are to run. 20 strands, 4.5 watts, 4 hours/night, 5 weeks = 12.600 kilowatt hours at $.12/kilowatt kilowatt hour = $1.50. Cost a bit more up front, but this with all the other power saving things I've done helps keep the electricity bill quite low. I'm waiting for some decent led spotlights I can use on my landscaping. Currently most are only solar and don't provide enough light. Hopefully they'll start making some with better leds in them. Heck, they've made led flashlights pretty impressive these days.

@FilthyHarry: That's wonderful!!!!

Long Live Robonnukah!

I have 1300 LED lights on my house from a mixture of manufacturers. The flickering and low brightness of most LED lights really bugs me. I was able to find some that use full-wave rectifiers that don't have a visible flicker. The multi-color strands appear the dimmest. Last year, I hung a couple of multi-color strands outside and thought they looked so bad I tore them off the house. This year after auditioning tons of sets, I bought separate colors--mostly blue and white--and am much happier with them than last year's batch.

LED lights, meh. They burn at a colder color temperature, so the "white" lights look blue. At Christmas/capitalmas time I prefer the warm glow of incandescent bulbs, they glow so much nicer in the smog filled skies. And think of the symbiotic relationship between smog and capitalmas lights, the more lights the more smog.

Ahhhh, I love the way nature works together with such (cough, cough) atmospheric results.

Just to be clear I am a capitalist. I just hate that we are all forced to buy gifts to celebrate some guy's birthday when even the experts can't agree on just who he was, son of God, prophet, dude with magical powers, or what? How does buying a Chia Pet for someone I barely like honor this dude, whoever he was?

How did I go from LED's to Chia Pet? I think i better stop typing now.

I haven't bought, nor disassembled any LED light sets yet, but assuming they use standard LEDs, they should not have aluminum leads. The leads on these LEDs would be intended for soldering, and the usual tin/lead solder (okay, nowadays it's a bit different, being lead-free) won't stick to aluminum at all. They're probably still copper, but "tinned" with solder (making it look like aluminum :^) ).

However, I'm willing to bet the cheap-ass manufacturer didn't tin any of the leads on the sockets, which would lead, naturally, to oxidization (which would probably deposit on the LED leads anyways), but not aluminum/copper corrosion.

What cons?

Wow talk about an LED Fetish..
Veddi Niceee...

Missing a bullet point there:
* Considered hoax devices in Boston