I understand the article is about series vs parallel but I'm sort of... Taken aback by the premise setup in the beginning that:
A.) Its hard to find the burnt out bulb(hint its almost always the one with the broken filiment)
B.) You should just throw the strand away
Maybe I'm just too old at 30(?) or I grew up underprivileged because I recall untangling lights and replacing burnt out bulbs well, as far back as I can recall. 7 or so? And throwing the strand away is just wasteful.
I understand there is an article to write but on one hand we have some guy writing about creating a sou-vide oven and on the other someone suggesting burnt out light bulbs are too hard to find. :|
I agree with you, and I also replaced burnt bulbs as a kid, but nowadays I'm seeing more and more Christmas lights using molded plastic instead of sockets (also, usually with LEDs instead of bulbs), so replacing them is much harder than it used to be.
True, but you shouldn't need to replace an LED bulb like you did the incandescent's. More likely to be a problem with the transformer or cheap wire and connections.
"in the event of a string of lights going out on your tree, replacing the strand is usually the best option. It’s pretty difficult to find that one bulb that’s causing the problem"
That one sentence sums up most of what is wrong with Christmas, and society, today. I find the "just throw it away if it's broken" attitude really difficult to accept. I would hope everyone reading HN has the self-awareness to consider where their possessions come from and what happens to them when they're thrown away.
It's not always easy to see the broken filament, or at least didn't used to be (I've not really examined many in detail recently).
As a kid in the 80s, I used to work in my dad's hardware shop and people regularly used to bring in lights that didn't work. We had a little test area set up where we would put each bulb in turn to find out which one(s) wouldn't light.
I used to use an ohm meter and a binary search algorithm to find the broken bulb in the series strands (waaaaay back in the day). My dad gave me the task as a challenge. I was quite young and into electronics, but it was before I had access to computers (or even calculators for that matter).
A.) Its hard to find the burnt out bulb(hint its almost always the one with the broken filiment)
B.) You should just throw the strand away
Maybe I'm just too old at 30(?) or I grew up underprivileged because I recall untangling lights and replacing burnt out bulbs well, as far back as I can recall. 7 or so? And throwing the strand away is just wasteful.
I understand there is an article to write but on one hand we have some guy writing about creating a sou-vide oven and on the other someone suggesting burnt out light bulbs are too hard to find. :|