Christmas lights are going up on homes and even trees earlier and earlier every year.
Before you pull out those old strands of lights — you might as well prepare yourself for the inevitable: some of the lightbulbs aren’t going to work. Incandescent tree light sets are not often well-made and during storage, bulbs can be broken or their wires can come apart inside the socket.
If you’re in charge of setting up the tree with lights, you probably know one bad bulb can spoil the entire set. If you’ve ever plugged in a strand of lights to find only a section actually lit up, the reason is there’s a problem with one bulb. One bad bulb breaks the circuit, keeping lights on the other side of the circuit from lighting up. In the past, you had to try and find the bad bulb by unplugging and re-plugging the light bulbs. Now, there’s another way — a tech gadget called The Lightkeeper Pro.
I picked one up at a hardware store for about $22 to test it out. Here’s how it works:
- When you plug in the set of lights, remove one of the bulbs that work and place the socket into a slot in the Lightkeeper Pro.
- Pull the trigger to send an electric pulse through the strand at such a rate that it leaps past the bad bulb (wherever that is). All of the lights should turn on, except the bad bulb.
- Replace the bulb you removed for the test, switch the bad bulb with a good bulb, and watch as the strand lights up from one end to the other.
This method almost always works, but the Lightkeeper Pro has a built-in backup just in case. If you run into a problem, the gadget has an audible beep to help you identify where the circuit is broken. Just click the trigger on either side of each bulb. When there’s no beep, you’ve found the bad bulb that breaks the circuit.
The original Lightkeeper Pro works only on incandescent light bulb sets. The company also has the LED Keeper to diagnose and repair LED light sets.
