I’m surprised a group of guys that like to take things apart and put them back together so they make more light haven’t posted any pictures of their creations. What do you have that would make the Griswold’s wonder if their’s were plugged in?
what we have has been downsized over the years.
electronic candles (3000K?) that sit in the windows
for “outside” lights and one long string of
soft white LED’s for the tree.
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I used to rig about 5 incandesent lights to my bicycle generator with one ornament on a tree that looked like the one on the Peanuts Christmas special mounted on the rear rack.
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I usually just wrap a couple strings of non-LED multicolor around my porch posts/columns. I actually haven’t done it in a couple years, for whatever reason. Also had some of those small spiral trees for the yard. I do have some kind of small pine/evergreen (4-5ft) in front of the house, but haven’t thought to decorate it until now.
back when I was married we would decorate with lights and stuff a lot more, I just haven’t really given it much thought lately.
This guy has a yearly rant about Christmas lights, including a section on tints. He’s pretty funny as well as thorough, his episodes in dishwashers are pretty epic.
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One of my former condo neighbors threw out a tabletop tree that looked like it would fit in with the tree from that Charlie Brown special and I put it in my condo for my cats. I figured they might like to lay under it, and they did. My GF was underwhelmed when I told her that was my only decoration.
Not really lights but here are my turtles and reindeer. The weather here hasn’t allowed me to get pictures of the lights and rest of the decorations yet.
I think of Clark as a rookie. For a number of years I would have 40,000+ lights but the main thing was 170 inflatables plus 100+ 3-D wire frame characters. Even have a custom made 16 foot tall inflatable Jesus. A lot of people get their pictures with him. Weekends was a line of cars and certain nights 4-5 buses would go by. It made the front page of the local paper and a short video of the TV weather. It would take from July through Jan to get them ready then take down and dry them out. Needed to add a 200 amp service and about 15 additional circuits. Things have cut back now but I really miss it
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I love his channel, he did a forty-minute video on the colour brown and somehow still made it interesting.
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Now that’s the kind of excess I was thinking if, well done!
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He’s amazing. I watched his dishwasher series and learned way more than I thought (who knew there was that much to know about them if you weren’t repairing them?) plus some of his others. His ability to combine research and testing reminds me of a safer version of Electroboom that’s everybit as interesting.
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The first picture is what we call “The Big Guy” with a human for reference. The other two are each about 30% of the whole display a few years ago.
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That’s seriously impressive.
There’s a farm in the way to way to my mom’s that started with a pumpkin patch that exploded into a light show at Halloween and now has another one at Christmas. Goebberts
They draw so many people that the county puts up signs advising through traffic to avoid the area during the shows.
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I clicked on this thread in part just to make sure the Technology Connections video gets shared. He shares the same appreciation of light quality and character/tint that many of us have, and filtered warm white* Christmas lights are also a desire of mine that has delayed me from replacing my incandescent lights.
I think phosphor converted color LED’s could also work well, and be more efficient, although getting the relative brightness of each color right might be a bit more complicated.
Two things he has not yet commented on:
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CRI - I have noticed consistently that part of the reason most color LED Christmas lights don’t look as nice is they provide poor illumination of their surroundings. The monochromatic light tends not to be a good match for the reflection spectrum of most real-world surfaces. Monochromatic LED’s might look quite bright to the eye in terms of the light heading straight to the eye, but hanging on a tree, only the green LED’s have a decent proportion of their light reflected by the green needles. Anyone who has shown a monochromatic red LED light in a forest or on a green lawn has a good idea of how dark all the foliage appears. Filtered white lights naturally leak a portion of the other colors through, providing a subtly more pleasant illumination of surrounding surfaces.
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Flicker - It seems like most LED Christmas lights flicker at either 60 or 120 Hz, due to simple rectification without smoothing. I’m not very sensitive to flicker, but I notice it walking past the Christmas light displays in stores. I guess driving past houses, I’m usually far enough away the lower intensity makes me less sensitive to it, but I wouldn’t want that level of flicker in my home.
* A good, mid to high CRI, neutral tint, warm white…not the low CRI, green tinted, semi-warm that a lot of “warm white” LED Christmas lights use.
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Nice.