I fully expect him to put in an extraordinary amount of effort and money to find someone who can do it just so he has the right colored lights for the holidays.
In Spain we have a thing called "laca para bombillas" (light bulb lacquer), and, as it's name says, it's a paint made specifically for painting light bulbs and works great.
In Germany there are two sorts of bulb lacquer availible. One is opaque and like water, that kind does not stick to plastic or LEDs very well, but was popular if one wanted to obscure the filament. The other is full of smelly solvents and dries instantly, it is much more transparent and one can dip LED into it. It is often sold in small bottles next to mirrorballs and fogmachines.
I bought a cheap string from Lowe’s this year that are exactly what you want. White LEDs with coloured caps. Very nice and even when mixed with incandescent strings my wife can’t tell which ones are the LEDs. I wish I could include a photo in the comments. They are holiday living branded sold at Lowe’s here
The early sets in the UK were typically olive or painted character lamps in strings of 12 20V lamps or 20 12V lamps. Then the little tubular sets appeared, but with decorative shades and sets of either 20 (12V) or 40 (6V). They never really got used outside much. They could be a bit dangerous. When I was a kid in the 60's our tree had a set of 20 olive lamps with metal foil stars held in by the lamps. It was only later that we discovered that the thin plastic insulating rims on the foil had mostly disappeared meaning our tree had a random selection of voltages on its stars.
My grandfather had a plastic Christmas tree with a set of old fashioned lamps on - probably 12 20V ones. They got hot enough to melt the plastic tree if they touched it...
Similar here in Eastern Europe, 20x 12V (13V-ish) bulbs, covered in colored plastic caps. Bought a few more last year some of these, live them a lot. And also last year took a few led strips from the USA, 60 led C6 bulbs in colored plastic caps. Had to rearrange them, of course to fit 220V. Apart from shimmering, they are great for my taste, too (and they are for outdoors).
As Clive says! - Except that in some sets, Olive and Cone seem to be synonymous with each other. Also, and I haven't looked at my "vintage" light sets as yet this year, there are more than the four basic colours we see today, typically; Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, White, but some years back, we had all sorts of colours appearing on the shelves in our shops - Purple was fashionable for a very short spell, and Pink also made a brief appearance. I have a few incandescent sets by "Noma" which run at 36v, and are five (at least) channel processor controlled. To be quite honest, I much prefer incandescent lights, absolutely abhor those hideous blue LEDs that my eyes cannot focus on - All I see is an horrendous mash of blue light.
In Brazil I used to buy something we used to call "verniz vitral", it's a clear varnish used to make fake stained glass, it's quite durable, and for this application all you need to do is dip the LEDs into the varnish and let it dry, apply multiple coats if necessary, it's quite easy to use and very durable.
@@singerofsongss It tints glass way better than nail polish. My mom uses this all the time, and I also must inform that the quality of the "vitric varnish" interferes quite a lot.
It thrills me to know someone else in this world is bothered by the way LED christmas lights look. However, as someone that likes painting nails, nail polish is what I've been using for some time now! One additional thrill that can be added with nail polish- I'll sometimes mix clear nail polish with glow in the dark pigment powder (basic stuff from amazon, but the multi colored pack) and then put a little dot on each bulb in a white pack. When the lights are turned on, it's un-noticeable. But, when you turn them off- BAM cool glowing lights that have been charging the entire time you've had your lights on. No one I've ever explained this to has been even remotely thrilled by the idea, but I thought you of all people might find it cool, if you do ever read random comments on videos you released years ago.
Tru-Tone LED holiday lights are the first I've seen that really do match the appearance of incandescent bulbs, but they're only available as C7 and C9 bulbs (no "fairy" lights), are pricey ($34.95 for a set of 25), and don't include the light string (although they do sell "vintage-style" strings as well). If that's too much for you, painting your own is the NeXT best thing.
I didn't even notice the string wasn't included. I mean it's good the bulbs can be bought separately, but yeah they aren't cheap. Still I'd be scared to run those new bulbs in an old-style string. Anyway, I will still likely see about ordering a set for next year. I hope they, like other modern LED lights, can be strung end-to-end in multiples. I DON'T know how we kept from blowing up every circuit in our house with those old incandescents.
Ideas for next year: 1) Poke the lights through cardboard to make mass painting faster, you can even alternate rows to make the colors in batches 2) air brushing sounds great, but have you looked Into specialty spray paints? There are several translucent ones and I think they candied effect from duplicolors metalcast "anodized" effect would be great, it's even made to go into things like engines and let the metal shine through 3) maybe 3d print some caps! Resin printing is based on hieght, not total size, so you can print a whole printbed of clear resin caps with colors mixed into the resin for all sorts of effects (glow in the dark, sparkles, and more are available as resin additives)
My first thought stubbling on this was nail polish. I've also mimicked mercury glass by swirling silver nail polish in glass coke bottles, etc. It makes cool vases.
8:05 can we all just appreciate that beautiful, steady smoke line coming off those flames?! It looks like a floaty string coming off the flame, connecting it to whatever is above the shot. Smooth, silky and waaaavy. I don't know why, but I quite enjoyed that part.
When I was a kid in the late '70s, my parents still had one string, ancient even then, of C9s that were painted instead of made from tinted glass. They got _even hotter_ than the tinted-glass kind. Like, lose-your-fingerprints hot. That was also back in the days when Christmas lights were wired in series, so when one bulb burned out, they all went out, making finding the dead one an incredibly tiresome process. Luckily, I had a nightlight that used the same size bulb, which my father would commandeer as a bulb tester. Ah, nostalgia. In retrospect, it's really kind of amazing how terrible those old light sets were. Between that and pre-polarization appliance plugs, it's a wonder anyone survived the 1960s.
Yeah, I have memories of Christmas tree lights that were molten hot 🔥 and lots of shiny tinsel, garland, and shiny balls! Our tree looked as bright as a ufo that was about to take off!! LOL Ah the memories 🥰 I still have the old extension cord that is definitely not safe, and use it with care.
@@applegal3058 we had one of the first fake trees back in the early 60s. Silver tinsel looking, branches stuck into holes in the stem with a light wheel underneath it. So cheesy but it couldn't burn 😂
Fortunately people still had habits that were compatible with having actual flaming CANDLES on trees, so . . . I guess it could have been worse? But yeah, Christmas tree fires were a real concern back then.
I just dug up a few strings of my parents’ old C9s and used them on my house. One of the only areas I’ll happily be environmentally unfriendly for a few weeks
thank you so much for captioning your videos. it's uncommon for people to put real effort into accessibility, and the fact that your captions are of such quality and the timing is so spot on, it's one of many reasons it's such a pleasure to watch your videos.
Taking a moment to shout out Tom Scott, who introduced me to this channel, who also captions his videos. It’s such a wonderful touch, really shows who’s 100% considerate of their audience.
I really appreciate his and all TH-camrs' efforts on putting closed caption!! I am not from the English-speaking world, and my English proficiency is not enough to fully understand the technical terms in TC's videos. I always turn on dual subtitles (English and translated Chinese) so that I can fully understand the content. I couldn't have get accessed to these interesting videos without closed captions.
Over here in Germany we have something called "Tauchlack". It is used for crafts and, wait for it, colouring light bulbs. For crafts, you basically bend a wireframe, then dunk it into the "Tauchlack". It will create a coloured film over the openings in the wirefame. It's used to make flower petals, etc. For light bulbs it is the same. The small bulb is dipped into it, coating it with a clear, coloured film (but can also be applied with a brush). It has rather deep colours. Dunno if you have an equivalent in the US.
I found it translates to "dipping lacquer" which is available from various brands in a wide array of colors and for various uses. But the method you described works with that product.
I vaguely recall tinkering with the stuff in my school's art class (US), had totally forgotten about it until I read this comment. I don't remember what we called it.
I've photographed a lot of concerts and scene shows, and when LED lights started happening, it's been absolutely terrible getting proper colors. I've wanted them to use white LED with gels on them instead of colored LEDs.
I think infrared with Phosphor coating produces about the best results, a warm white light. Not sure if a visible red with Phosphor would be better but I know if the underlying color wavelengths get too short (more green/yellow) then the resulting white light feels colder. There's no such thing as a truly white LED since white is a mix of different wavelengths and LEDs can only produce single wavelengths, a phosphor coating is almost always used. Phosphor is also used for incandescent bulbs to make them brighter and more efficient since it converts most infrared and heat to 'white' light.
You can't beat the colour of red, green or blue LEDs. Those colours are so pure and amazing that nothing really compares nor beats them. However, if you want other colours then you have a problem, and that's basically because LEDs don't really come in those colours.
Tru-Tone is really onto something, their branding is absolutely on point! If they go on and make these mini lights I think the boost from your channel could be huge for them!
I'm glad that my family members aren't the only ones that see the flashing and hate the overpowered blue. I've taken to connecting a capacitor on the input after the diodes in the least safe way possible. Not a great idea from a safety standpoint, but it reduces or removes the flashing :)
You have to be careful with the capacitor trick because if you put too large of a capacitor on it you can make the voltage high enough to hurt the bulbs since peak AC line voltage is about 170 volts. I too hate the flickering of the bulbs, but my solution is to "simply" use a line isolated DC power supply. The old lab power supply I had lying around weighs 22kg (almost 50 lb), but it works just fine. My second setup used 9 regulated 12 volt wall warts hooked in series. I later increased that to 10 and added a floating LM 117 regulator for that extra pure DC feel. --- And who thinks Technology Connections is eccentric, to me it seems quite normal. I suspect most people who regularly watch this channel think the same thing. As far as I'm concerned, it's my neighbors and my relatives and most of the other people I meet who are eccentric.
@@LeeKeels Yes, you can; but the selection is limited, they tend to be more expensive, and, most importantly, it's taking the easy way out. If it isn't equivalent to hand painting each bulb in a 50 light string, I would consider that moral slacking.
I really appreciate your obsession over finding the right Christmas Lights. In my country it's impossible to find any lights that DON'T have music automatically playing as soon as you plug them, and my family thinks I'm weird for opening them to remove the little sound thing every time.
And now imagine having like 10 strings of these on one tree, each playing a different squeaky melody out of sync with each other. This is why I hate all kinds of Christmas decorations that make sound. Not only they disrupt the calmness of Christmas and possibly music played from actual audio equipment, but they are not stackable. And you'd normally want to have a lot of different Christmas decorations rather than just one.
A tip from the world of nail polish fanatics: look for a “jelly” or “sheer” finish nail polish. As compared to cremes, they have a translucent look and buildable color. I’ve been using 5 Below jelly polish for model stained glass windows, and they work pretty well!
I realize how difficult it is to be a creator on this platform… You are damn good at explaining the basic things that make up complex technology. I like your style Dude….
I appreciate your work on this topic, and you are not alone in yearning for a 4 color LED light set that does not make your eyes hurt. Thank you for your continued research.
Some things about LEDs, their colors, and why it's less expensive to use different colored LEDs with the same color caps: 1. White LEDs are generally the same price as or more expensive than blue LEDs. This is because white ones are actually just the blue ones with a layer of phosphor added to give it a fuller-spectrum glow. Additionally, blue is the most expensive color, because achieving the short wavelengths requires more expensive equipment in terms of the semiconductors involved. This basically means that a string of LEDs with mostly reds, greens, and yellows, plus some blue ones peppered in, is much less expensive than a string of all-white (read: all blue+phosphor) ones. 2. LEDs are probably off-the-shelf components for the Christmas light company. They do not make them in house because that requires a clean room and all sorts of very fancy machines. Your typical made-in-china string lights are probably assembled from parts that are mostly bought from industrial suppliers, and the price wouldn't change no matter how many different colors they buy. 3. the bulb caps, if they're those classic teardrop Christmas light shapes, are probably *not* off-the-shelf parts. These are not something that would be useful to any other industry or product, so it makes much less sense to outsource them except to save on skilled labor costs (which is not a thing Chinese factories usually do since they have some of the cheapest labor in the world). The implication of those being made in house is that it *would* significantly impact production overhead to make multiple colors - that's most likely a dedicated line for each color since switching between colors on an injection molder wastes a bunch of plastic. It's much lest costly to produce only one color - clear.
I will add- tons of work has gone into making blue LED's cheaper and brighter and more efficient. I don't think any of the other colors of LED have gotten as much love, because the blue LED's are the only ones needed to make the "white" LED's. It's no surprise to me that the blue LED's on a string seem so much brighter than the other colors- manufacturers aren't making special dim blue LED's just to match the brightness of other colored LED's. They have a process to make blue LED's that are bright and efficient, and whichever ones don't make the cut (binning) for higher end products get sold on the cheap to make things like Christmas light strands.
@@djlemma White LEDs are stupidly cheap now. In the hall I have a set of 27 that came wired with a battery holder and a set of small pegs for holding greeting cards all for £1. I was so impressed I bought several sets.
Have you looked at the caps on color LED light sets. They are already made in various colors. A lot of them also have the same color LED under the cap.
I think the suggestion is that the extra cost in sourcing a bunch of different products instead of just one, and the more complicated assembly involved when there's a bunch of different coloured LEDs insead of only one type, might outweigh the different colours individually being cheaper. Of course if that were true then presumably christmas lights manufacturers would already be doing that and we wouldnt be having this conversation
I am disappointed that I shall not be able to click your username to be directed to every single insightful and intelligent and thoughtful comment you have gifted the world because Google would rather have it that discourse did not exist in real time space. Le sigh.
I remember painting incandescent lightbulbs on New Year lights 30 years ago - and it was in Moscow where I live all my life. That was to substitute the color of broken caps (that came in all kinds of regular colors, of course). The thing is that nail polish other than red, pink, tan, and white (all those in various shades, and with or without luster sparks) was hard to come by then here (unlike now; then it was a matter of fashion, and for a 10-year old me electric blue, bright green, yellow or black nails were rather hard to imagine) . So it's sort of weird that the late Soviet/Russian “make do” approach appears as the best solution for a Mid-Western American well into the 21st century. Actually, nail polish had surprisingly many uses in the 1980s and 1990s anywhere where you needed small amounts of fast-drying and durable paint.
@@philixer6769 I am thinking probably not. Consider that the life expectancy of many in the old soviet block has declined since then and you might have a inkling.
@@noleftturnunstoned Yeah, you're right. That change was good for the rest of the world but not for the Eastern block. Maybe Gorbachev's plan was a better idea. He was a pretty good man, I'm from Poland and he gave us an opportunity to end Soviet times in our country in probably 1986, but Polish communists didn't allow it. Anyway, Poland looked good until some political party got into ruling and we're getting slowly back into communism… I want to get Poland back into the right-wing. If the situation won't change, I will move to the USA.
You might try a more "commercial" approach, and fill small, refillable vials (like trimmed plastic test tubes [kids toys]) and dip the lights so they all receive an even coating, and drip evenly as the tips of the lights are perfect for wicking without splotching, and make multiple passes with as many coats as you'd like. Notably, the "gel" nail polish is a tad more expensive, but clings thicker; but can also be cut if it's too thick for your application with a chemical thinner product.
Nail polishes can vary greatly in every aspect, so if there was something you didnt like about those specific ones, there may be others out there with just the right texture, colour, opacity etc.
this year at Home Depot (Canada) they started selling LED mini Christmas lights with a case that is glass, rather than plastic. The box said it delivers a more classic look than the current plastic versions. The string they had connected to power to showcase it did look much better than its plastic peers so I think we might be very close to better looking LED Christmas lights!
@@SmokeMonster Hello! Model # CAN408-2015M|Store SKU # 1001539016 or 100-Light Multi-Coloured M5 Glass Mini Light LED Christmas Lights by Holiday Brilliance if you can't find them using the codes.
As a UK native the larger strings of lights with full size lamps (or larger than fairy lights) are typically called festoon and are primarily used for larger events and installations. Often on public xmas tree displays and town center lighting they run mains and often have small rubber boots that close over the lamp bases to make them somewhat weatherproof. The connectors are often CEEEform connectors that are also mildly IP rated when mated and can take a bit of tension while hanging (although they shouldn't). They can be used with LED lamps but often aren't if they are attached to a mains dimmer. You could also use them with low voltage DC lamps but they tend to be more expensive. Also they are usually wired as a single circuit so you won't get any twinkling effects or the like, you can get professional LED outdoor lights (Big Clive has some great videos looking at these) that have more potential for animation but they get much more expensive, much faster.
I felt like pointing him towards the Blackpool Illuminations. Still we have the fun combination of fairly hot mains with a damp and often salty climate; cheap outdoor lamps sounds like a lot of fun.
If you follow through with the airbrush idea, I would also recommend using the new line of "Contrast" paints (or competing lines) being made by a lot of the major wargaming miniature painting companies. I was attempting to find a good way to tint clear acrylic shells for video game controllers to make them all "Atomic Purple" and after warping them with RIT dye and seeing the price of expensive lense dyes, the guy at my local citadel store told me the contrast line works very well as a tint when used in an airbrush. The only thing that might make it too effort intensive was when I started trying to make the other transparent controller shades from the 90s I had to mess around with thinning the paints with their medium to get the desired shade. I eventually took to buying a pack of cheap acrylic baseball card protectors, hitting them with a clear acrylic top coat as a primer and just messing around with ratios on each color. It took a while, but I can report that the level of control I had over every step in the color process meant I was happy with the final results every time.
By only targeting a niche audience of hobbyists, Citadel paint is really not the best bang for your bucks and it's better to search for better quality fine-art paint instead or go for some brand like Vallejo who do both in a more serious approach. Fine art paint also provides a way much larger pigment choice, different pigment thinness and viscosity. And by using pure single-pigmented paint it is way easier to mix them to suit a desired color where doing this with premixed-only lines like Citadel it gives muddy/greyish results.
I really like how much you are like myself. You don't put up with asinine change. I can't even count the number of atrocities that retailers and businesses have decided upon, for seemingly terrible reasons, and we need someone like yourself to name and shame companies that make decisions on profit alone, or to please the few that are complaining and not continue to please the quietly content... Thank you!
Nice to see this series come back, missed it last year. :) C9 (and C7) are the codes for the lamp shapes. The C describes the candle like appearance and the number means the maximum diameter in 8ths of an inch. Hope this helps you.
Third unrelated comment: dyes are weird. When different wavelengths hit a dye they are either reflected, absorbed or transmitted. A good reflective dye should fully reflect the desired color and transmit the remaining wavelengths making it useless as a transparent coating. I learned this by printing transparencies (remember those?) on an ink-jet printer. Colors on the screen did not match those on a sheet of paper!
colors on the screen also did not match paper because it requires software color calibration from the monitor as well as the individual printer CMYK profile and the characteristics of paper/support. Even with that the quality of the ink differs from brand to brand and must be compensated when using third party higher or lower grade ink. And of course a good daylight source is required for comparing a print to a display.
I used a sting of red LED in my bedroom to replicate the lights out effect aboard US Navy Ships. I found this to be something I had grown so accustomed to, that now 30 years after my service, the red lights are a comfort. To explain, at night aboard US Navy ships the white berthing compartment lights are turned off, but a separate set of red lights come on. In 1980s they were just fluorescent tubes in a red sleeve. Otherwise it would be pitch black due to a lack of port holes. Too dangerous for the late night watch standers to get around. The red light preserves our night vision and minimizes the stress of moving into a working compartment or passage way that is white lit 24/7.
I've heard that low-intensity red and orange light is best for sleeping because we as humans have gotten acclimated to sleeping next to fires these past few thousands of years. Few years ago I bought a nightlight that has a replaceable bulb socket, I put a red lightbulb in it and kept it in my bedroom. It might just be a placebo effect, but I've noticed a definite change in my sleep pattern since I started doing this. I'm not as insomniac as I used to be.
I keep night lights in various locations around the house with orange C7 Christmas light bulbs in them. People think I'm weird, but they just don't understand. 😊
I’m so glad he made a video on this. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a while. Most if not all colored LED string lights are just too blue and… aggressive. Incandescent is much nicer (warmer) but so much less efficient.
This is also the exact reason I absolutely loath LED headlights and streetlights. It seems that everyone switching from incandescents to LEDs has no interest in actually trying to make a *good* product.
I am the weirdo who actually likes the old-skool coloured sets with the amber and magenta....and I have been following your quest with hopes held high. ....but ERMEGERD I want a set of those Tru-Tone LED clear-tinted ones. I like my holiday tree to be a pure riot of colours and different elements. I want to mix fairy lights and C9s and bubble-lights and set some of them blinking and others twinkling. I even want to find a set of those big ol' foil reflectors we used to put on those hot-burning C9s back in the day to keep our real (too dry) tree from catching fire. I want my Christmas tree to look like Las Vegas got lost in a pine forest.
If you really want a riot of colors, you can try the thing some others have mentioned in the comments and try out programable RGB lights. Though for most people making any aditional programs that it didn't come with seems rough, but most of them come with a few baked into them.
i use string lights year-round and i like a mix of orange and purple -- so i buy a few sets before halloween each year. as for other colours -- i alter colours using washi tape.
Ah, so as an artist who's had her share of trying to replicate things that either don't exist or only exist in very limited, hard-to-find-forms, I have a little insight that might be helpful in testing different methods to clover the lightbulbs going forward if the nail polish doesn't work out. The primary reason the Sharpie ink didn't work is because standard Sharpies are alcohol-based, and no alcohol ink is _lightfast_ which denotes how stable a given color is over time when exposed to light. So in coloring Christmas lights, that's a two-fold problem: The ink is constantly exposed to the...well, _light_ of the lights themselves when they're turned on, as well as any light in their environment. I haven't used model paints before, but I suspect they held up better partially because _paints_ in general tend to actually be made with some form of pigment, and pigment-based color tends to have better staying power than dye/alcohol-based (as I think you already know because you seem to lean towards pigments whenever possible). All that said, other kinds of professional-grade acrylic paints would probably work in terms of lightfastness and how well the paint holds up over time, but would have the same messy application issues as the model paint; Nail polish wouldn't be considered "professional-grade" by most artists, but since it's designed to hold up on fingers that receive a good beating from washing and daily use (and light exposure), there's a good chance that will work just fine for stationary Christmas lights and you won't _need_ any further testing (other than maybe seeing what a clear topper does), _but_ If you do, my recommendation would be to look at lightfast inks like one would use in a calligraphy or fountain pen. The colored inks are genuinely vivid in color but are relatively thin (so they can flow properly in a pen), and you can find ones that have a dropper attached to the lid which might add ease to application, depending on how you go about it. I have experience using the Dr. Ph. Martin's BomBay India Inks specifically and can confirm they (with the exception of two shades of brown) dry quickly, brightly, and are not easily disturbed once dry. The only real issue with these particular inks I've had is that, because they're pigment-based, you have to shake them thoroughly before each use because the pigment settles out, and a few of the bottles have pigments that develop strange odors if you keep them for extended amounts of time.
Probably shouldn't use underscores to create accent in text on TH-cam -- as you can see, its ended up incidentally making entire sentences italics unintentionally. Try slashes /like this/ or something!
When it comes to India Ink, It's to my knowledge that only blacks are actually resistant to dulling in light. Technically I think only the blacks are true India ink but idk. My Winsor & Newton ink says "Only black and white inks are permanent to light" but all colours also have a shellac in them that may also help.
I was mesmerized by LED Christmas lights the first time I saw them, the vibrant colors drew my eyes immediately. I still prefer them over the incandescent ones I grew up with. Plus, the power savings is a huge advantage.
Yep a neighbor puts up incandescent colored C9's on their porch, and I think they just look absolutely dingy. The greens and blues especially look sickly. Maybe they're a really cheap and/or an old set. If all white, they'd probably look all right.
I did think it was neat how the filament C9 bulbs would melt through the snow that fell on them. Though I also thought it was cool when there was enough snow that the bulb couldn't melt it and ended up forming these giant color-glowing blobs of snow on the bushes the lights were hung on. (Yes; in addition to having mains voltage running through a cheap string of outdoor lights, we also hung them on the evergreen bushes lining the front of our house. Festive fire hazards!)
Deck the yard with balls of fire Fa la la la la La la la la Check the fuse or we’ll all expire Fa la la la la La la la la Electric bills that need financing Fa la la La la la La la la Premiums that keep advancing Falalalala la la la Laaaaaa
Atleast we are past the point in history where people would hang candles in their indoor Christmas tree, now that is a fire hazard. Also running mains voltage is actually safer than running say 12v because the heating is based off of the current and for the same power load a higher voltage has less current, granted we could also use a thicker wire to reduce most of heating hazard anyway and then the shock hazard would encourage lower voltages.
I love that you do this, several times now. My wife also hates the LED lights and every time you make one of these I keep joking that you're going to steal her away from me. You are a joy sir.
My favorite LED lights I have are the custom ones I made a few years ago after seeing them on BigClives’s channel. I took strings of 50 incandescent lights and replaced them with 10mm diffused straw hat LEDs and they came out great. Of course you need to add a proper power supply. I used a capacitive dropper like Clive did.
Great idea! I had a set of lights with coloured LEDs that was hard to look at. Now I'm painting the clear tops with white nail polish and it dulls the garish colour down to a much softer light that doesn't hurt the eyes.
Heat shrink tubing. Comes in all sizes and colour. Find some that's transparent enough to let light shine through. You can pinch the end when it's hot to close the top.
By the way, inductive mains testers are great for checking which bulb has blown on a series string. Just start from the live end and touch the outer casing of the wire between each bulb, and when the mains tester doesn't light up you've found a blown bulb. Replace it and continue down the string. Much faster than swapping bulbs to test them.
@@calmeilles he's talking about using a live current tester on the wires. You run it down the string and when you get to a blown bulb the wire past it won't be 'live'
THANK YOU! This has driven me crazy about LED Christmas lights for years, to the point that I've largely stuck with incandescents despite spending hours every year hunting for dead bulbs. It's nice to know I'm not the only person who's felt that way. I'll have to check out the Tru-Tone lights when they're back on sale this winter.
Thanks for agreeing with my distain for modern led xmas lights and the mention of Tru-Tone. I grew up putting up 50s era C9 and C7 strings up in the family home the 80s with my dad. Moved to mini light strings when the vintage strings started shedding wire insulation. Would love to get back into C9s with the LED replacements!
This has bugged me for a long time. 8 years ago I got my first strand of individually addressable RGB LED lights and started experimenting with an Arduino and a few other boards to get them to light up exactly the way I want. Change the code to change the colours and patterns. So much easier than paint. Flickering effects can be done really nicely as well. There are various libraries people have written to make this very easy to do.
Nail varnish is awesome. Some of my most cherished memories are of painting fishing lures with my grandfather, picking from the 20+ cheap pots in the jig box to get just the right look. They're also great for marking fasteners for "Been torqued" or "someone tampered...", doing inlay work on polyhedral dice, painting minifigs, etc etc. I'll have to add "frosted light filter coat" to the toolkit!
I'm glad to see someone else who don't like the narrow spectrum of light that LED-lights have. I also noticed that the blue lights seem to be the strongest, casting your garden in a blue glow. I'd like to make my own but I'd skip the blue entirely I think. I'd like to have red, green and golden yellow lights together. That'd be great.
Cheap polish is really good as well because it usually is very sheer on nails, so great for letting light through. I will say, I’d love a purple/teal set. I do love those two colors.
I was raised on strings of the C9 bulbs wired in series, and we kept re-using the same strands of lights for almost 30 years before the line literally broke. Finally, a few years ago, I found the strings with C9 LED lights, that were so much cooler than the old fire hazard strings. Oddly enough, we used the C9 bulbs for the tree, but the C7 strands for outdoor lighting. The very first tree I remember though was one of those aluminum foil trees that you shone the floodlight with the four color spinner at to change the color of the tree, and it was really prettier than it sounds. My aunt had an artificial white flocked tree that she used a colored strand of bulbs on, and covered the strands with some sort of spun fiberglass that gave each bulb a halo effect, she used the red green yellow blue strands, but always only had dark blue ceramic teardrop ornaments on that white tree, it was so stunning.
Can you elaborate on the aluminum foil tree? I have never even heard of such a thing and am having difficulty even imagining it or what to search. I do believe i have seen the spinny light tho, in person no less
13:21 Yes!!! Changing the color combinations is a great idea 🙂 Then we could use red, pink, and whites for Valentine’s Day; spring pastels for Easter; light and dark greens for St Patrick’s day; and red, white and blue for Fourth of July. And just any combo at any time we like to suit our fancy would be a great thing to be able to do!
back in the days when we had light bulb drip paint we used to do that. sadly those paints stopped over 30 ys ago when coloured light bulbs became cheaper. My family used to dye light bulbs for Christmas and for outdoors in summer
In the UK, what you were calling "mini lights" we'd just call Christmas lights, or in general just "fairy lights". Even before the LED ones they've always had a transformer in the plug, so yes you're correct that we don't run 240V through tiny cheap bulbs with narrow wires, outdoors. Ours also don't have the weird plugs at both ends thing that your guys' lights have, there's just a plug at one end, and if you need more lights you either buy a longer set, or just plug both sets straight into the wall, not into each other.
Those passthrough sockets would not be allowed for outdoor installations under UK law as they lack an approved weatherproof enclosure to protect the socket from water ingress.
@@jamesvandamme7786 To be fair as much as have my criticisms when it comes to America that isn't actually that shocking. I have literally seen 4 of those heavy bricks hanging out of an outlet with the sheer weight alone causing the whole mess to bend downwards and leave a full 1cm gap between the top first adapter and the outlet. Not sure whether your claim of six is hyperbole or not but that pretty much loaded the socket to the max, any further and the electrical connection likely would have broken. The adapter closest to the outlet was probably barely energised by the skin of the outlets teeth at that point. Considering that I actually convinced my friend to let me open the outlet to inspect it and the ends of the internal contacts were warped like limp plastic instead of copper I suspect that probably is close to the truth also. I really do doubt that copper would plastically deform under that relatively small mechanical stress unless ohm heating helped to lower it's elastic limit.
This video is a perfect example of why diversity in science is so important. It would have taken other groups of people, who regularily wear nail polish, probably less than 3 years to take a shot at doing this with nail polish (probably on the fact alone, that it would have been more readily available than other paints). The same obviously applys to you as well, who, given your background will figure out good solutions to certain problems way differently and/or quicker than other people. The same applys to a lot of other problems and different social, cultural, or age groups, which is why it is so important to have scientists from as many backgrounds as possible. I'm happy you have a good solution to your christmas light problem now :)
In Europe, or at least in Italy, we have very small incandescent lights in a heat shrink tube: they run at 2 to 3 volts and a strand is powered by a 240 to 24Vac transformer so there is no risk of electric shock. I love your videos btw.
Yes, we had outdoor sets like that in the uk- in fact, there’s still a set laying around somewhere. Ours (from the late ‘80s, I imagine) had rubber collars around the base of the bulb to give some degree of weather tightness, and spares can still be had. I seem to recall Big Clive did a video some years back where he had designed a 3D- printable cap for led string lights, vaguely reminiscent of the old 12 bulb olive lamp sets for indoor use that another comment has mentioned. Oddly enough, these could be bought in Woolworth’s rather as you suggest- a bulbless string which you then populated by choosing your own bulbs, many of which were ‘figural’, being blown into shapes such as snowmen, Chinese lanterns, horrifying Father Christmas heads and so on.
This is probably my favorite ongoing series of your videos. I don't even have a place of my own to decorate with lights but it's delightful every time.
Commenting before watching the whole video: I've been through this for an art project; In major art stores they sell paint for making fake "stained glass". It doesn't hold up on incandescent bulbs... It burns. But it should work on LEDs just fine.
There ARE xmas LED light strings with in-line FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIERS and are much more tolerable. Not the cheap kind that has a ~29V DC output, these things carry mains to the end so you can chain ~30 strands of 100 LEDs together at 2 rectifiers and 50 LEDs per strand in parallel. The search term for these is "full wave".
12:42 Poland here. Decorating your house is less of a thing, and even decorating a tree outside is rather niche thing. That said, 240V run though series as-cheap-as-possible lightbulbs was a thing, and did cause a lot of concerns. I do remember indoor lights in similar format, but it was like one 40-50yo set that I never used.
@@techtastisch7569 But to be honest, the Chinese "killing your customers after they've paid is fine"-style light strings with 20 LEDs and a handful of resistors in series directly over 240V are readily available, too.
Im Switzerland it's quite common to have "party lights" which are a bit rounder than C9 on 230V. (small E27 bulbs, if that screw socket norm is also common in the 110V countries). The Sockets for these lights are simply screwed on a two pole flat cable, where to power the socket the insulation is pierced with two pointed screws. The Socket is well insulated but if someone decides to move the Sockets a bit you would end up with a cable with holes in it 😉 In fairness these Lights are more a thing in summer for the right ambiance in a open air bar or so, but you could also usecthem for christmas lighting. But then its also a thing to put burning Candles on our christmas Trees at home. (I heard from my Grandfather, that in some US States you are not allowed to do that).
This channel is pushing the cutting edge of cutesy dorm room projects. If I had been 3 years younger watching this video I would have been painting mini lights for my college dorm all November long
OMG. I feel so seen lol. I have been feeling equally upset about this for years! I'm so glad I'm not the only one & also I could cry from finding out about the LED C9. You have no idea what you've done haha. Thank you so much. I hope for all our sakes the industry finally figures this out.
This video couldn't have better timing. I was digging around in the attic and found an old set of C9 sting lights from my childhood. I found it by stepping on a bulb hearing that iconic "pop" sound. Funny part was, I immediately started to her Mavis Staples - Christmas Vacation playing in my head. Ahh the simple things in life, lol.
If you're looking for a good paint to colour the LEDs try duplicolor metalcast. Comes in many colours that are very rich and hold up well outside. I used this to paint the bulb for a pool and it held up underwater for 3 years before the bulb burnt out. Paint was still fine.
Lovely as ever mate. I've added your "by the magic of buying two of them" to my projects and my headaches have reduced so far. And hey! who doesn't like spares! cheers and have a lovely holiday season!
I've hoarded hundreds of vintage, painted glass bulbs from the 1970s and 1980s, along with their accompanying sockets/wires. These are my Christmas lights. They're the best. The luminous, but soft glow of solid colors is just a sight to behold. I LOVE them. It's only a few months out of the year, so I can live with them not being energy efficient. They're perfect to fall asleep to during the holiday season.
Tbh, Haven't even put up any decorations for a few years. That said, I appreciate all the research that went into this and past years videos. It's becoming a tradition watching! Thanks you! Happy hololoblboblobllb!!!
We had these C9 lights on the Christmas tree when I was a little kid. They used American voltage so we also had a transformer, which got hot very quickly, so we could only leave them switched on for a few minutes at a time. My grandpa probably got them in the late 50s or 60s, maybe from an American military shop. We might even still have them somewhere in the attic.
I love your obsession with Christmas lights. I too feel that they are the most important part of the holiday and cringe when driving through my neighborhood and being forced to view the holiday decorating failures on many a lawn.
I love the colors of LED lights, and I love the brightness, I love everything about them except the flickering. So much worse when you drive by in a car also.
Yup, I'm sticking with incandescents until the directional brightness, evenness of brightness, overall brightness, flickering, and color gamut issues are reliably fixed in a brand of LED lights. I kinda like a six or seven color light set (with orange, magenta, and maybe purple for the extra colors -- no teal), but I understand the dislike of the colors beyond the basic four.
There isn't going to be any technical advancement in the LEDS you buy in the big box stores. Basically if a good set that costs $25 dollars is next to a lousy cheap one that costs $15 dollars, the $15 set will vastly outsell the $25 and the $25 dollar set will never be brought to market. The general public doesn't really know or care about uniformity or color gamut. They want the cheapest possible product. The absolute cheapest cost of materials and construction even if it is fractions of a penny per lamp will be all that matters to both the manufacturer and the store buyers. So all we are ever going to see are half wave rectified, monochromatic color leds, with the shape of plastic the LED is illuminating being the only marketable difference.
The best improvement on your method would probably be dipping the bulbs instead of brushing them. This would also be the closest to how "real" painted bulbs are made at the factory. The "hard" part of this method would be moving your paint color into a container where you could dip the entirety of the bulb up to the base without any interference, but the results should be much more even than with a brush (Air powered or traditional).
I mean if you’re just doing the little bulbs, you could just dip them into the nail polish bottle. I wonder if they’re a similar enough size that you’d “cap” the bottle so you could turn it upside down to fully coat the bulb? I don’t know if nail polish bottles have an actual standard size.
Re the mains voltage thoughts: Here in Iceland (and I believe the rest of Scandinavia) we've always used full-size 240V 40W E27 bulbs, which have colored glass, and as such are always beautiful. These ginormous lights pretty much were the only exterior lighting option for all houses and trees for decades. As you would expect, should one of these bulbs break due to... anything... you've basically got full live 240V open to the elements. And fingers. Which is particularly fun if you're digging between the branches looking for that one bulb that's out, but it's Iceland so it's pitch black 20 hours a day and your only illumination are the other bulbs on the tree so you can't really pull the plug. 😁 But at least them being in parallel means that one or even 49 out of 50 bulbs can go out without any issues or effects for the working bulbs.
Gleðileg jól! I tend to think of Scandinavians as being superior in both safety and energy efficiency. This is giving me some cognitive dissonance. I guess you can blame such problems on the jólasveinar, no?
@@squirlmy Hah, incandescent bulbs have been outlawed here for a decade or more, so we're stuck with our annoyingly efficient and safe LED lights these days. 😅 But the 240V lights are perfectly safe. Just don't poke the sockets with a screwdriver (or a finger) unless you're actively trying to test if it's plugged in or not. 😁
You should have started by talking to my mother..... When I was young, in the 60s, we still had a very old c7 light string, old enough to only have about 10 sockets on the wire....as well as some chunky blocks that were probably, in retrospect, fuses! We used this antique for the few remaining shaped christmas bulbs we had left (4 kids and a dog). There was a santa bulb, and I recall a train car, and a few others. AND there was a reminder of when my mother was young, during WW2, with supply shortages making luxuries like christmas bulbs hard to find. Her solution (or her parents...) was to use a C7 sewing machine bulb, still available in clear, and.....wait for it.....paint it red with nail polish. And decades later, despite the searing C7 heat (7 watts per bulb, I believe, those bigger C9s were 9 watts for outdoors) it was still looking pretty good. Regarding bulb removal....when I was young(er) I made an illuminated sign for a neighborhood event. It said MERRY CHRISTMAS and the construction paper letters on cardboard were studded with early and cheap small bulb sets...and to end up with the needed number of lights, maybe 10 per letter, I used an assortment of different size sets....35s, 50s, maybe a 100. Of course I pulled all the little bulbs (with their two exposed wire lead contacts on the base) so the sockets could be behind the cardboard, and the bulbs went in from the front. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess. Only after did I learn, when the sign lit up with some dim bulbs and some glaringly bright ones, that the electrical design at the time was to use bulbs wired in series to get to approximately 120 volts per string....so the seemingly identical bulbs varied in voltage ratings, some about 3 volts and others lower. I was lucky the hotter brighter bulbs didn't cause a fire. And I suppose you were supposed to keep the spare bulbs in the little baggie, along with the twinkle-causing bulb, separate from all the OTHER little baggies from different voltage sets... My wish list for holiday lights would be the translucent C7 twinkle incandescent bulbs that GE used to make. Each one had a little bimetallic strip inside, which broke the bulb circuit when heated, then restored it when cooled. Back then, when I still had working ears, you could sit near the tree in a quiet room and hear a chorus of little metal chiming bells, almost, as they went off and on. It was magical! But of course they stopped making them, or changed sources, and the last time I tried ordering GE bulbs or others that promised to Twinkle....they were sadly silent, and in fact barely twinked at all.
I honestly look forward to these videos from you every Christmas! I am 1000000% with you on the garish colors of colored LED mini-lights. I avoid them like the plague too. And it really bums me out because I'd love to be able to commit to a large set of multicolored lights for outside. Really excited to hear about the C7/C9 bulb company you mentioned! They're the chosen ones as far as I'm concerned, and I just learned about them. I'm a web guy, I'll offer to help with their SEO problems for free if it gets them the momentum it needs! Keep fighting the good fight!
I love this video! I appreciate people who get deeply into the details. And NO, you are NOT the only person annoyed by the bright eye-searing blue-purple LEDs!
Twinkly smart Christmas lights solved the obnoxiously glaringly bright colour issues on LED lights for me this year. You use an app to adjust the colours and brightness (including to much nicer muted tones), plus there’s many different transitions and effects available (or you can make your own). You can also set them up by scanning the lights with your phone’s camera in the app so it maps the LEDs to their position on the tree so you can do some fancy things with the lighting that way. Very neat.
The only thing those lights remind me of every year is the fact that they flicker at gird frequency I can even see it on camera (30fps, what shutter speed did you use?). So annoying... I wish every LED light manufacturer, no matter what kind of light, would put a "FULL BRIDG ERECTIFIUH" on top of the circuit
you can retrofit a FULL BRIDGE RECIFIER in the form of an in-between plug, that would work in one orientation and not in the other. However care must be taken that no genuine AC appliance is plugged into this. There are safer variations of this theme depending on the level of DIY you are willing to go.
Holy Moly! As someone who has been subbed less than a year (and admittedly hasn't finished watching your backlog of previous videos), I am SO happy to hear someone else sharing my irritation at heavily saturated monochromatic blue Christmas lights! I've been talking to everyone (they just don't get it) about this since LED Christmas lights started to catch on here in Australia!
Honest question: what's wrong with monochromatic blue? (or other colors)? Is this just a matter of subjective taste, or can you describe it in more detail?
@@zephsmith3499 The monochromatic colors tend to be very cool (cold even, in the case of blue), whereas the traditional, older lights have a warmth to them that LEDs just cannot mimic without some work/expense (neither of which the traditional consumer will tolerate, but I sure as hell would pay for). The current generation of LED Christmas lights make my brain bleed. At least *some* manufacturers are fully rectifying their sets so they don't strobe (as much.. LEDs still have a cutoff voltage so they are off for a fraction of a second, and I'm one of the unlucky ones that can see that).
@@zephsmith3499 A certain bright twinkle of white incandescent light within the blue glass results in an assortment of hues and intensities. A complex display of the filament's warmth against the soft dark blue bulb. Its why I love incandescent "fairy" Christmas lights to this day. In addition, cheap LED lights often will have a very mild but disorienting strobe, which is especially noticeable indoors, and there is a certain lost beauty in the stark monochromatic color compared to that bright twinkle set in a colored frame. I recommend Technology Connections' video on RGB where he shows how an absence of white light and only one color will effectively render huge swathes of a scene eerily dark, while the broad emittance of white light, even through a colored bulb, allows for much greater detail in a lit scene.
@@DasPlayer2 Thanks for answering. I will look for his video on that. I agree about the flicker, particularly in the box store half wave led lights. I seem to be somewhat more sensitive to this than average (because sometimes I mildly complain and my companion sees no problem). One can buy full wave lights online, but I have also used a full wave rectifier inline to convert half way strings to full wave (pay attention to power dissipation issues tho). Another factor in flicker is how many LEDs are in each series string - typically around 33 or around 50. The more LEDs in series, the higher their combined Vfwd, meaning that they illuminate for shorter period of time on each half cycle (when the AC voltage is higher). In other words, AC flicker is an issue but can be mitigated fairly well. (However, most of my LED lights are actually running DC with higher frequency PWM anyway, which is not so visible). Back to color hues - which would affect even non-flickering DC driven LEDs. "A certain bright twinkle of white incandescent light within the blue glass results in an assortment of hues and intensities. A complex display of the filament's warmth against the soft dark blue bulb." Interesting. Just as I appear to be somewhat more sensitive to flicker than some folks, I may be less sensitive to this factor. It would be interesting to do some testing with multiple volunteers to get a better sense of how common this kind of discernment is. And, without any negative implications, I am struck by how similar your description is to the kinds of things that vinyl lovers say regarding digital music. Anyway, thanks for explaining and I'll try to find more in TC's video specifically on the subject.
Try using clear Elmer's glue mixed with food coloring. You can adjust the amount of food coloring to create any color you want. You can also use the white glue if you want more of a frosted look.
@@synthgal1090 I think the idea is that the UV coating will also protect against rain. That's a dicey proposition with a sprayed-on coating, but it ought to work if you apply it via dipping.
One thing to consider looking into is jelly nail polish (not to be confused with gel nail polish), which is intentionally more transparent, instead of having the frosted look of normal "creme" nail polish. I'm also kind of curious to see what would happen if a glittery nail polish was used on lights bulbs like this - I'll have to give it a try myself!
I'm obsessed with real colors too. Philips made some when LED lights were new that had perfect colors (and no purple!). I bought three strands and wish I got more because I have yet to see anything like them. Also next year you should try plasti-dip, like the kind in the cans that plier handles and other tools are dipped into (not the spray). I think it might hit the happy medium between opaque and transparent, and it should be very durable.
Companies have experimented, including in China, and there are about a dozen or so visible LED colours now. Partly through them emitting different frequencies (they're still mostly monochromatic), and partly through messing about with phosphors. Nothing to stop you getting a load of LEDs, sticking a resistor to each leg, and running them all in parallel off 5V from a USB adaptor. Nice and safe, and 10mA is plenty for an LED, actually 3 or 4mA might be better if you want them dim. So you should be able to run a shitload of them off one USB. You could even put a few ultraviolet ones in and paint some decorations with UV nail polish. It's the harmless kind of UV. In fact you could do one string entirely of UV and see how that sets things off.
I had a thought when you mentioned fabric dye. You could try using hair dye. Every time I add more purple or green to my hair I have to bleach my shower multiple times because it stains so effectively. Manic Panic is pretty common, but there are a bunch of other brands (I personally use good dye young for my hair, but that's a bit expensive for experimenting). Also yeah, green nail polish seems to be super uncommon, with very little variety. It's either neon, or almost black
I'm amazed by how far you're digging into this subject, and bringing us all with you on that journey ! I wonder if window colors would work, the kind that are usually for creating rubbery and repositionable window art.
I'm really enjoying this becoming annual tradition. and I am glad I'm not the only person that misses the orange old school glow of the non led lights from back in the day! think I might have to get some nail polish!
There is a higher quality solution available for this. All you need is either leather or wood dyes, alcohol based. And some nitrocellulose lacquer - matte if you want matte, glossy if you need glass like transparency. Mix an larger amount of dye (say, 10ml), with about 50ml of lacquer. Stir nicely and just put your bulbs in it for a second.
Oh, by the way, I didn't do this last year. That's why I skipped 2020. But then, we all did, didn't we?
What's a 2020?
@@CalebFrey It's a year of Shmurzdays. 2021 has mostly followed suit.
Love love love the NeXT shirt but there is no way you're old enough to know them well. :-)
Have you tried alcohol paint? It's great for gelling glass
Great, but how do you make prints from film?
I fully expect next year's video to be about how you go to Shenzhen and find a manufacturer to build custom covers for LED lights.
I fully expect him to put in an extraordinary amount of effort and money to find someone who can do it just so he has the right colored lights for the holidays.
"This time, as I further fail no effort November, I will be showing you how to place and manufacture custom LED covers for Christmas lights!"
I just got some lights off amazon this year that are just plastic covers over cheap white leds.
He should hire Steve from GN as translator and tour guide, that'd be AWESOME
We can certainly hope!
In Spain we have a thing called "laca para bombillas" (light bulb lacquer), and, as it's name says, it's a paint made specifically for painting light bulbs and works great.
+
Same in Germany. At least it existed back in the 80s---I never had the wish to paint a lightbulb after that one time we did that at school... ;)
Huh. This evidently also exists in the US, though it appears to be for 'staining' glass. I'm not sure what it would do to plastic.
A quick google for "light bulb lacquer" reveals that it is still readily available.
In Germany there are two sorts of bulb lacquer availible. One is opaque and like water, that kind does not stick to plastic or LEDs very well, but was popular if one wanted to obscure the filament. The other is full of smelly solvents and dries instantly, it is much more transparent and one can dip LED into it. It is often sold in small bottles next to mirrorballs and fogmachines.
I bought a cheap string from Lowe’s this year that are exactly what you want. White LEDs with coloured caps. Very nice and even when mixed with incandescent strings my wife can’t tell which ones are the LEDs. I wish I could include a photo in the comments. They are holiday living branded sold at Lowe’s here
Maybe you can upload the photo to a image hosting site then paste the link in the comments??
@@vmaldia Links in YT comments cause the comment to get autodeleted. This applies to replies as well.
Well, this is youtube, you could probably just upload a short video of them
Are they mini lights?
Those sound perfect, could you please post the brand or or item number? I would love to find some sets of them.
The early sets in the UK were typically olive or painted character lamps in strings of 12 20V lamps or 20 12V lamps. Then the little tubular sets appeared, but with decorative shades and sets of either 20 (12V) or 40 (6V). They never really got used outside much.
They could be a bit dangerous. When I was a kid in the 60's our tree had a set of 20 olive lamps with metal foil stars held in by the lamps. It was only later that we discovered that the thin plastic insulating rims on the foil had mostly disappeared meaning our tree had a random selection of voltages on its stars.
I read this comment entirely in Big Clive's voice. Wonderful.
My grandfather had a plastic Christmas tree with a set of old fashioned lamps on - probably 12 20V ones. They got hot enough to melt the plastic tree if they touched it...
@@AaronHastings same
Similar here in Eastern Europe, 20x 12V (13V-ish) bulbs, covered in colored plastic caps. Bought a few more last year some of these, live them a lot.
And also last year took a few led strips from the USA, 60 led C6 bulbs in colored plastic caps. Had to rearrange them, of course to fit 220V. Apart from shimmering, they are great for my taste, too (and they are for outdoors).
As Clive says! - Except that in some sets, Olive and Cone seem to be synonymous with each other. Also, and I haven't looked at my "vintage" light sets as yet this year, there are more than the four basic colours we see today, typically; Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, White, but some years back, we had all sorts of colours appearing on the shelves in our shops - Purple was fashionable for a very short spell, and Pink also made a brief appearance.
I have a few incandescent sets by "Noma" which run at 36v, and are five (at least) channel processor controlled.
To be quite honest, I much prefer incandescent lights, absolutely abhor those hideous blue LEDs that my eyes cannot focus on - All I see is an horrendous mash of blue light.
In Brazil I used to buy something we used to call "verniz vitral", it's a clear varnish used to make fake stained glass, it's quite durable, and for this application all you need to do is dip the LEDs into the varnish and let it dry, apply multiple coats if necessary, it's quite easy to use and very durable.
To add to this: Craft stores in the use do have this! There are spray versions and paint on versions.
This!
I would guess that the varnish is actually quite similar chemically to nail polish. This is a great suggestion!
@@singerofsongss It tints glass way better than nail polish. My mom uses this all the time, and I also must inform that the quality of the "vitric varnish" interferes quite a lot.
Sounds like the stuff known in the UK as 'French Enamel Varnish'.
TC: "This is no effort november!"
Also TC: "I painted christmas lights by hand!"
That's why he has no effort November; he has the paint all of his Christmas lights.
My thoughts as well.
Yeah but he was going to do that anyway
@@amosbackstrom5366 This video counts as a tax write-off.
That's wildly inaccurate!
It should be "I painted christmas lights by hand AGAIN."
It thrills me to know someone else in this world is bothered by the way LED christmas lights look. However, as someone that likes painting nails, nail polish is what I've been using for some time now! One additional thrill that can be added with nail polish- I'll sometimes mix clear nail polish with glow in the dark pigment powder (basic stuff from amazon, but the multi colored pack) and then put a little dot on each bulb in a white pack. When the lights are turned on, it's un-noticeable. But, when you turn them off- BAM cool glowing lights that have been charging the entire time you've had your lights on. No one I've ever explained this to has been even remotely thrilled by the idea, but I thought you of all people might find it cool, if you do ever read random comments on videos you released years ago.
When I read “glow powder” I said “oh hell yeah” out loud
that’s a super cool idea!
You're a genius omg
Big Clive would love this
Tru-Tone LED holiday lights are the first I've seen that really do match the appearance of incandescent bulbs, but they're only available as C7 and C9 bulbs (no "fairy" lights), are pricey ($34.95 for a set of 25), and don't include the light string (although they do sell "vintage-style" strings as well). If that's too much for you, painting your own is the NeXT best thing.
I second this! I replaced all of my C9s with Tru-Tone LEDs this year and they are fabulous! Expensive yes but well worth it!
I didn't even notice the string wasn't included. I mean it's good the bulbs can be bought separately, but yeah they aren't cheap. Still I'd be scared to run those new bulbs in an old-style string.
Anyway, I will still likely see about ordering a set for next year. I hope they, like other modern LED lights, can be strung end-to-end in multiples. I DON'T know how we kept from blowing up every circuit in our house with those old incandescents.
Lol NeXT tshirt
I had no idea such things existed - and then realized they don't in 220V and my mood crashed back down.
Maybe next year, if I'm a good boy.
I bought four strands. They're perfect. I mentioned technology connection to them, too.
Ideas for next year:
1) Poke the lights through cardboard to make mass painting faster, you can even alternate rows to make the colors in batches
2) air brushing sounds great, but have you looked Into specialty spray paints? There are several translucent ones and I think they candied effect from duplicolors metalcast "anodized" effect would be great, it's even made to go into things like engines and let the metal shine through
3) maybe 3d print some caps! Resin printing is based on hieght, not total size, so you can print a whole printbed of clear resin caps with colors mixed into the resin for all sorts of effects (glow in the dark, sparkles, and more are available as resin additives)
This should be higher up
Instead of airbrush or spray, just dip the items into the paint.
Cardboard for masking and tinted translucent car paint sounds like a pretty good solution. Anything meant for car painting is sure to be UV tolerant.
My first thought stubbling on this was nail polish. I've also mimicked mercury glass by swirling silver nail polish in glass coke bottles, etc. It makes cool vases.
Ah yes, a Glow-in-the-dark lightbulb.
your captions are of such quality and the timing is so spot on
I love the touch with captions at the end with only jazz music. Felt like a secret message.
The captions are priceless!
Since he's almost always reading off a script, I'm sure that makes it easier.
"no effort november" lol
From what he's mentioned before, he does them all himself, which is astounding, even with a script.
8:05 can we all just appreciate that beautiful, steady smoke line coming off those flames?! It looks like a floaty string coming off the flame, connecting it to whatever is above the shot. Smooth, silky and waaaavy. I don't know why, but I quite enjoyed that part.
When I was a kid in the late '70s, my parents still had one string, ancient even then, of C9s that were painted instead of made from tinted glass. They got _even hotter_ than the tinted-glass kind. Like, lose-your-fingerprints hot. That was also back in the days when Christmas lights were wired in series, so when one bulb burned out, they all went out, making finding the dead one an incredibly tiresome process. Luckily, I had a nightlight that used the same size bulb, which my father would commandeer as a bulb tester. Ah, nostalgia.
In retrospect, it's really kind of amazing how terrible those old light sets were. Between that and pre-polarization appliance plugs, it's a wonder anyone survived the 1960s.
I had one of those until last year. I miss it.
Yeah, I have memories of Christmas tree lights that were molten hot 🔥 and lots of shiny tinsel, garland, and shiny balls! Our tree looked as bright as a ufo that was about to take off!! LOL Ah the memories 🥰 I still have the old extension cord that is definitely not safe, and use it with care.
@@applegal3058 we had one of the first fake trees back in the early 60s. Silver tinsel looking, branches stuck into holes in the stem with a light wheel underneath it. So cheesy but it couldn't burn 😂
Fortunately people still had habits that were compatible with having actual flaming CANDLES on trees, so . . . I guess it could have been worse? But yeah, Christmas tree fires were a real concern back then.
I just dug up a few strings of my parents’ old C9s and used them on my house. One of the only areas I’ll happily be environmentally unfriendly for a few weeks
thank you so much for captioning your videos. it's uncommon for people to put real effort into accessibility, and the fact that your captions are of such quality and the timing is so spot on, it's one of many reasons it's such a pleasure to watch your videos.
Taking a moment to shout out Tom Scott, who introduced me to this channel, who also captions his videos. It’s such a wonderful touch, really shows who’s 100% considerate of their audience.
His video about Close captions was among first i watched
I really appreciate his and all TH-camrs' efforts on putting closed caption!! I am not from the English-speaking world, and my English proficiency is not enough to fully understand the technical terms in TC's videos. I always turn on dual subtitles (English and translated Chinese) so that I can fully understand the content. I couldn't have get accessed to these interesting videos without closed captions.
Over here in Germany we have something called "Tauchlack". It is used for crafts and, wait for it, colouring light bulbs. For crafts, you basically bend a wireframe, then dunk it into the "Tauchlack". It will create a coloured film over the openings in the wirefame. It's used to make flower petals, etc. For light bulbs it is the same. The small bulb is dipped into it, coating it with a clear, coloured film (but can also be applied with a brush). It has rather deep colours. Dunno if you have an equivalent in the US.
I found it translates to "dipping lacquer" which is available from various brands in a wide array of colors and for various uses.
But the method you described works with that product.
I vaguely recall tinkering with the stuff in my school's art class (US), had totally forgotten about it until I read this comment. I don't remember what we called it.
I've photographed a lot of concerts and scene shows, and when LED lights started happening, it's been absolutely terrible getting proper colors. I've wanted them to use white LED with gels on them instead of colored LEDs.
I think infrared with Phosphor coating produces about the best results, a warm white light. Not sure if a visible red with Phosphor would be better but I know if the underlying color wavelengths get too short (more green/yellow) then the resulting white light feels colder. There's no such thing as a truly white LED since white is a mix of different wavelengths and LEDs can only produce single wavelengths, a phosphor coating is almost always used. Phosphor is also used for incandescent bulbs to make them brighter and more efficient since it converts most infrared and heat to 'white' light.
You can't beat the colour of red, green or blue LEDs. Those colours are so pure and amazing that nothing really compares nor beats them.
However, if you want other colours then you have a problem, and that's basically because LEDs don't really come in those colours.
@@grn1 White LEDs are typically either blue or ultraviolet with a phosphor coating.
Tru-Tone is really onto something, their branding is absolutely on point! If they go on and make these mini lights I think the boost from your channel could be huge for them!
I'm glad that my family members aren't the only ones that see the flashing and hate the overpowered blue. I've taken to connecting a capacitor on the input after the diodes in the least safe way possible. Not a great idea from a safety standpoint, but it reduces or removes the flashing :)
You can also buy sets that specifically say non-flickering.
@@LeeKeels But wheres the fun in that? You don't have to be inventive if you do that
You have to be careful with the capacitor trick because if you put too large of a capacitor on it you can make the voltage high enough to hurt the bulbs since peak AC line voltage is about 170 volts. I too hate the flickering of the bulbs, but my solution is to "simply" use a line isolated DC power supply. The old lab power supply I had lying around weighs 22kg (almost 50 lb), but it works just fine. My second setup used 9 regulated 12 volt wall warts hooked in series. I later increased that to 10 and added a floating LM 117 regulator for that extra pure DC feel. --- And who thinks Technology Connections is eccentric, to me it seems quite normal. I suspect most people who regularly watch this channel think the same thing. As far as I'm concerned, it's my neighbors and my relatives and most of the other people I meet who are eccentric.
@@mehpainter no incentive to be inventive!
@@LeeKeels Yes, you can; but the selection is limited, they tend to be more expensive, and, most importantly, it's taking the easy way out. If it isn't equivalent to hand painting each bulb in a 50 light string, I would consider that moral slacking.
I really appreciate your obsession over finding the right Christmas Lights. In my country it's impossible to find any lights that DON'T have music automatically playing as soon as you plug them, and my family thinks I'm weird for opening them to remove the little sound thing every time.
Holy cow... That would drive me nuts...
Dear god, that's like the evil spirit of Christmas trying to haunt you.
What sadist came up with that idea?
@@300DBenz The same people who keep making monochrome hard to focus on and makes me feel blind blue lights
And now imagine having like 10 strings of these on one tree, each playing a different squeaky melody out of sync with each other. This is why I hate all kinds of Christmas decorations that make sound. Not only they disrupt the calmness of Christmas and possibly music played from actual audio equipment, but they are not stackable. And you'd normally want to have a lot of different Christmas decorations rather than just one.
A tip from the world of nail polish fanatics: look for a “jelly” or “sheer” finish nail polish. As compared to cremes, they have a translucent look and buildable color. I’ve been using 5 Below jelly polish for model stained glass windows, and they work pretty well!
I realize how difficult it is to be a creator on this platform… You are damn good at explaining the basic things that make up complex technology. I like your style Dude….
He needs a research assistant. Adding Opaque,Full Wave(flicker free), or bulb to led to a search for Christmas Lights addresses all his issues.
I appreciate your work on this topic, and you are not alone in yearning for a 4 color LED light set that does not make your eyes hurt. Thank you for your continued research.
Some things about LEDs, their colors, and why it's less expensive to use different colored LEDs with the same color caps:
1. White LEDs are generally the same price as or more expensive than blue LEDs. This is because white ones are actually just the blue ones with a layer of phosphor added to give it a fuller-spectrum glow. Additionally, blue is the most expensive color, because achieving the short wavelengths requires more expensive equipment in terms of the semiconductors involved. This basically means that a string of LEDs with mostly reds, greens, and yellows, plus some blue ones peppered in, is much less expensive than a string of all-white (read: all blue+phosphor) ones.
2. LEDs are probably off-the-shelf components for the Christmas light company. They do not make them in house because that requires a clean room and all sorts of very fancy machines. Your typical made-in-china string lights are probably assembled from parts that are mostly bought from industrial suppliers, and the price wouldn't change no matter how many different colors they buy.
3. the bulb caps, if they're those classic teardrop Christmas light shapes, are probably *not* off-the-shelf parts. These are not something that would be useful to any other industry or product, so it makes much less sense to outsource them except to save on skilled labor costs (which is not a thing Chinese factories usually do since they have some of the cheapest labor in the world). The implication of those being made in house is that it *would* significantly impact production overhead to make multiple colors - that's most likely a dedicated line for each color since switching between colors on an injection molder wastes a bunch of plastic. It's much lest costly to produce only one color - clear.
I will add- tons of work has gone into making blue LED's cheaper and brighter and more efficient. I don't think any of the other colors of LED have gotten as much love, because the blue LED's are the only ones needed to make the "white" LED's. It's no surprise to me that the blue LED's on a string seem so much brighter than the other colors- manufacturers aren't making special dim blue LED's just to match the brightness of other colored LED's. They have a process to make blue LED's that are bright and efficient, and whichever ones don't make the cut (binning) for higher end products get sold on the cheap to make things like Christmas light strands.
@@djlemma White LEDs are stupidly cheap now. In the hall I have a set of 27 that came wired with a battery holder and a set of small pegs for holding greeting cards all for £1. I was so impressed I bought several sets.
Have you looked at the caps on color LED light sets. They are already made in various colors. A lot of them also have the same color LED under the cap.
I think the suggestion is that the extra cost in sourcing a bunch of different products instead of just one, and the more complicated assembly involved when there's a bunch of different coloured LEDs insead of only one type, might outweigh the different colours individually being cheaper. Of course if that were true then presumably christmas lights manufacturers would already be doing that and we wouldnt be having this conversation
I am disappointed that I shall not be able to click your username to be directed to every single insightful and intelligent and thoughtful comment you have gifted the world because Google would rather have it that discourse did not exist in real time space. Le sigh.
I remember painting incandescent lightbulbs on New Year lights 30 years ago - and it was in Moscow where I live all my life. That was to substitute the color of broken caps (that came in all kinds of regular colors, of course). The thing is that nail polish other than red, pink, tan, and white (all those in various shades, and with or without luster sparks) was hard to come by then here (unlike now; then it was a matter of fashion, and for a 10-year old me electric blue, bright green, yellow or black nails were rather hard to imagine) . So it's sort of weird that the late Soviet/Russian “make do” approach appears as the best solution for a Mid-Western American well into the 21st century.
Actually, nail polish had surprisingly many uses in the 1980s and 1990s anywhere where you needed small amounts of fast-drying and durable paint.
1991? It was that Christmas time when the Soviet Union was down! Were you happy that day?
@@philixer6769 I am thinking probably not. Consider that the life expectancy of many in the old soviet block has declined since then and you might have a inkling.
@@noleftturnunstoned Yeah, you're right. That change was good for the rest of the world but not for the Eastern block. Maybe Gorbachev's plan was a better idea. He was a pretty good man, I'm from Poland and he gave us an opportunity to end Soviet times in our country in probably 1986, but Polish communists didn't allow it. Anyway, Poland looked good until some political party got into ruling and we're getting slowly back into communism… I want to get Poland back into the right-wing. If the situation won't change, I will move to the USA.
isn't that a fire hazard with how hot incandescent lights get? nail polish is flammable
@@philixer6769 just move already
You might try a more "commercial" approach, and fill small, refillable vials (like trimmed plastic test tubes [kids toys]) and dip the lights so they all receive an even coating, and drip evenly as the tips of the lights are perfect for wicking without splotching, and make multiple passes with as many coats as you'd like.
Notably, the "gel" nail polish is a tad more expensive, but clings thicker; but can also be cut if it's too thick for your application with a chemical thinner product.
I second this dipping approach. It sounds much easier than painting on coloring.
Came here to suggest this. Very good idea.
You could probably even make a jig with a 3d printer to hold the socket of the bulb and dip it precisely to the right depth.
Doesn't he famously not have a 3D printer?
@@androiduberalles doing this without a 3d printer is still very doable tho
I love this. Pedantic decorations and engrossing yourself in hobbies is one of the greatest parts of the holidays.
Nail polishes can vary greatly in every aspect, so if there was something you didnt like about those specific ones, there may be others out there with just the right texture, colour, opacity etc.
this year at Home Depot (Canada) they started selling LED mini Christmas lights with a case that is glass, rather than plastic. The box said it delivers a more classic look than the current plastic versions. The string they had connected to power to showcase it did look much better than its plastic peers so I think we might be very close to better looking LED Christmas lights!
That's awesome 👌!
Do you know the product name or item number for those? I'd love to get a set.
@@SmokeMonster Hello! Model # CAN408-2015M|Store SKU # 1001539016
or 100-Light Multi-Coloured M5 Glass Mini Light LED Christmas Lights by Holiday Brilliance if you can't find them using the codes.
I am so impressed by how comprehensive even your No Effort November videos are
This video should be part of a new segment titled High Effort November, or HEN for short.
As a UK native the larger strings of lights with full size lamps (or larger than fairy lights) are typically called festoon and are primarily used for larger events and installations. Often on public xmas tree displays and town center lighting they run mains and often have small rubber boots that close over the lamp bases to make them somewhat weatherproof. The connectors are often CEEEform connectors that are also mildly IP rated when mated and can take a bit of tension while hanging (although they shouldn't). They can be used with LED lamps but often aren't if they are attached to a mains dimmer. You could also use them with low voltage DC lamps but they tend to be more expensive. Also they are usually wired as a single circuit so you won't get any twinkling effects or the like, you can get professional LED outdoor lights (Big Clive has some great videos looking at these) that have more potential for animation but they get much more expensive, much faster.
All I want for Christmas is a Big clive, collab with technology connections
I felt like pointing him towards the Blackpool Illuminations. Still we have the fun combination of fairly hot mains with a damp and often salty climate; cheap outdoor lamps sounds like a lot of fun.
Next year: "Stealing public Christmas tree display lights"
@Cemi sorry bro, I want good looking LED Christmas lights
If you follow through with the airbrush idea, I would also recommend using the new line of "Contrast" paints (or competing lines) being made by a lot of the major wargaming miniature painting companies. I was attempting to find a good way to tint clear acrylic shells for video game controllers to make them all "Atomic Purple" and after warping them with RIT dye and seeing the price of expensive lense dyes, the guy at my local citadel store told me the contrast line works very well as a tint when used in an airbrush. The only thing that might make it too effort intensive was when I started trying to make the other transparent controller shades from the 90s I had to mess around with thinning the paints with their medium to get the desired shade. I eventually took to buying a pack of cheap acrylic baseball card protectors, hitting them with a clear acrylic top coat as a primer and just messing around with ratios on each color. It took a while, but I can report that the level of control I had over every step in the color process meant I was happy with the final results every time.
By only targeting a niche audience of hobbyists, Citadel paint is really not the best bang for your bucks and it's better to search for better quality fine-art paint instead or go for some brand like Vallejo who do both in a more serious approach.
Fine art paint also provides a way much larger pigment choice, different pigment thinness and viscosity. And by using pure single-pigmented paint it is way easier to mix them to suit a desired color where doing this with premixed-only lines like Citadel it gives muddy/greyish results.
I really like how much you are like myself. You don't put up with asinine change. I can't even count the number of atrocities that retailers and businesses have decided upon, for seemingly terrible reasons, and we need someone like yourself to name and shame companies that make decisions on profit alone, or to please the few that are complaining and not continue to please the quietly content... Thank you!
Bigger and brighter is better. C'mon, combined with closer spacing, I'll have a house sized TV within the decade.
Nice to see this series come back, missed it last year. :)
C9 (and C7) are the codes for the lamp shapes. The C describes the candle like appearance and the number means the maximum diameter in 8ths of an inch. Hope this helps you.
That is actually really cool information. And just the type of information I'd expect from this part of TH-cam.
He needs a research assistant. Adding Opaque,Full Wave(flicker free), or bulb to led to a search for Christmas Lights addresses all his issues.
Between the 8 Bit Guy buying peroxide, and Alec buying nail polish, the beauty industry has done more for technological aesthetics than it ever knew
Third unrelated comment: dyes are weird. When different wavelengths hit a dye they are either reflected, absorbed or transmitted. A good reflective dye should fully reflect the desired color and transmit the remaining wavelengths making it useless as a transparent coating. I learned this by printing transparencies (remember those?) on an ink-jet printer. Colors on the screen did not match those on a sheet of paper!
Hey now, don't get mean.
Back in the days before digital projectors were a thing I recall "printing" powerpoint slides on to 35mm slide film to solve this problem
colors on the screen also did not match paper because it requires software color calibration from the monitor as well as the individual printer CMYK profile and the characteristics of paper/support. Even with that the quality of the ink differs from brand to brand and must be compensated when using third party higher or lower grade ink. And of course a good daylight source is required for comparing a print to a display.
I used a sting of red LED in my bedroom to replicate the lights out effect aboard US Navy Ships. I found this to be something I had grown so accustomed to, that now 30 years after my service, the red lights are a comfort. To explain, at night aboard US Navy ships the white berthing compartment lights are turned off, but a separate set of red lights come on. In 1980s they were just fluorescent tubes in a red sleeve. Otherwise it would be pitch black due to a lack of port holes. Too dangerous for the late night watch standers to get around. The red light preserves our night vision and minimizes the stress of moving into a working compartment or passage way that is white lit 24/7.
I've heard that low-intensity red and orange light is best for sleeping because we as humans have gotten acclimated to sleeping next to fires these past few thousands of years.
Few years ago I bought a nightlight that has a replaceable bulb socket, I put a red lightbulb in it and kept it in my bedroom. It might just be a placebo effect, but I've noticed a definite change in my sleep pattern since I started doing this. I'm not as insomniac as I used to be.
I keep night lights in various locations around the house with orange C7 Christmas light bulbs in them. People think I'm weird, but they just don't understand. 😊
@@youdontknowme5969 I do this too!!!
I’m so glad he made a video on this. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a while. Most if not all colored LED string lights are just too blue and… aggressive. Incandescent is much nicer (warmer) but so much less efficient.
This is also the exact reason I absolutely loath LED headlights and streetlights. It seems that everyone switching from incandescents to LEDs has no interest in actually trying to make a *good* product.
I am the weirdo who actually likes the old-skool coloured sets with the amber and magenta....and I have been following your quest with hopes held high. ....but ERMEGERD I want a set of those Tru-Tone LED clear-tinted ones. I like my holiday tree to be a pure riot of colours and different elements. I want to mix fairy lights and C9s and bubble-lights and set some of them blinking and others twinkling. I even want to find a set of those big ol' foil reflectors we used to put on those hot-burning C9s back in the day to keep our real (too dry) tree from catching fire. I want my Christmas tree to look like Las Vegas got lost in a pine forest.
If you really want a riot of colors, you can try the thing some others have mentioned in the comments and try out programable RGB lights. Though for most people making any aditional programs that it didn't come with seems rough, but most of them come with a few baked into them.
I love the imagery of "like Las Vegas got lost in a pine forest".
@@xarin42 not chaotic enough
@@MonkeyJedi99 My go-to analogy for exterior illumination has been it should look like the Vegas Strip's and Disney World's love child!
i use string lights year-round and i like a mix of orange and purple -- so i buy a few sets before halloween each year.
as for other colours -- i alter colours using washi tape.
Ah, so as an artist who's had her share of trying to replicate things that either don't exist or only exist in very limited, hard-to-find-forms, I have a little insight that might be helpful in testing different methods to clover the lightbulbs going forward if the nail polish doesn't work out.
The primary reason the Sharpie ink didn't work is because standard Sharpies are alcohol-based, and no alcohol ink is _lightfast_ which denotes how stable a given color is over time when exposed to light. So in coloring Christmas lights, that's a two-fold problem: The ink is constantly exposed to the...well, _light_ of the lights themselves when they're turned on, as well as any light in their environment.
I haven't used model paints before, but I suspect they held up better partially because _paints_ in general tend to actually be made with some form of pigment, and pigment-based color tends to have better staying power than dye/alcohol-based (as I think you already know because you seem to lean towards pigments whenever possible).
All that said, other kinds of professional-grade acrylic paints would probably work in terms of lightfastness and how well the paint holds up over time, but would have the same messy application issues as the model paint; Nail polish wouldn't be considered "professional-grade" by most artists, but since it's designed to hold up on fingers that receive a good beating from washing and daily use (and light exposure), there's a good chance that will work just fine for stationary Christmas lights and you won't _need_ any further testing (other than maybe seeing what a clear topper does), _but_
If you do, my recommendation would be to look at lightfast inks like one would use in a calligraphy or fountain pen. The colored inks are genuinely vivid in color but are relatively thin (so they can flow properly in a pen), and you can find ones that have a dropper attached to the lid which might add ease to application, depending on how you go about it. I have experience using the Dr. Ph. Martin's BomBay India Inks specifically and can confirm they (with the exception of two shades of brown) dry quickly, brightly, and are not easily disturbed once dry. The only real issue with these particular inks I've had is that, because they're pigment-based, you have to shake them thoroughly before each use because the pigment settles out, and a few of the bottles have pigments that develop strange odors if you keep them for extended amounts of time.
Probably shouldn't use underscores to create accent in text on TH-cam -- as you can see, its ended up incidentally making entire sentences italics unintentionally. Try slashes /like this/ or something!
When it comes to India Ink, It's to my knowledge that only blacks are actually resistant to dulling in light. Technically I think only the blacks are true India ink but idk. My Winsor & Newton ink says "Only black and white inks are permanent to light" but all colours also have a shellac in them that may also help.
Good thing there is no such thing as the color brown.
One thing I retain from my chemistry degree: if the instructions say to shake, it's easier and probably more effective to invert ten times.
@@TerryPullen Clearly, the commenter meant to say "two shades of orange."
I was mesmerized by LED Christmas lights the first time I saw them, the vibrant colors drew my eyes immediately. I still prefer them over the incandescent ones I grew up with. Plus, the power savings is a huge advantage.
Yep a neighbor puts up incandescent colored C9's on their porch, and I think they just look absolutely dingy. The greens and blues especially look sickly. Maybe they're a really cheap and/or an old set. If all white, they'd probably look all right.
I did think it was neat how the filament C9 bulbs would melt through the snow that fell on them. Though I also thought it was cool when there was enough snow that the bulb couldn't melt it and ended up forming these giant color-glowing blobs of snow on the bushes the lights were hung on.
(Yes; in addition to having mains voltage running through a cheap string of outdoor lights, we also hung them on the evergreen bushes lining the front of our house. Festive fire hazards!)
Deck the yard with balls of fire
Fa la la la la La la la la
Check the fuse or we’ll all expire
Fa la la la la La la la la
Electric bills that need financing
Fa la la La la la La la la
Premiums that keep advancing
Falalalala la la la Laaaaaa
Atleast we are past the point in history where people would hang candles in their indoor Christmas tree, now that is a fire hazard.
Also running mains voltage is actually safer than running say 12v because the heating is based off of the current and for the same power load a higher voltage has less current, granted we could also use a thicker wire to reduce most of heating hazard anyway and then the shock hazard would encourage lower voltages.
Back then when lighting up the Christmas tree had a literal meaning.
I love that you do this, several times now. My wife also hates the LED lights and every time you make one of these I keep joking that you're going to steal her away from me. You are a joy sir.
My favorite LED lights I have are the custom ones I made a few years ago after seeing them on BigClives’s channel. I took strings of 50 incandescent lights and replaced them with 10mm diffused straw hat LEDs and they came out great. Of course you need to add a proper power supply. I used a capacitive dropper like Clive did.
Great idea!
I had a set of lights with coloured LEDs that was hard to look at.
Now I'm painting the clear tops with white nail polish and it dulls the garish colour down to a much softer light that doesn't hurt the eyes.
Heat shrink tubing.
Comes in all sizes and colour.
Find some that's transparent enough to let light shine through.
You can pinch the end when it's hot to close the top.
LED lights don't get hot enough for that I think. But it's not a bad idea.
@@DaedalusYoung You'd use a heat gun or hair dryer, not the heat of the bulb
Alec: "No Effort November"
Also Alec: "So anyway I hand painted my Christmas lights"
Multiple times.
By the way, inductive mains testers are great for checking which bulb has blown on a series string. Just start from the live end and touch the outer casing of the wire between each bulb, and when the mains tester doesn't light up you've found a blown bulb. Replace it and continue down the string. Much faster than swapping bulbs to test them.
Bulb that is blown does not light? Yes?
@@nom3nnescio If they in parallel that would be right. But if they're in series the one blown bulb breaks the circuit and all will be dark.
@@calmeilles he's talking about using a live current tester on the wires. You run it down the string and when you get to a blown bulb the wire past it won't be 'live'
@@Fulmir- Exactly. It's so much easier and quicker for a mains series string than swapping the bulbs one by one and testing them individually.
@@owensmith7530 It's really good advice. Those things are like $10 or less, and I'd never thought of using one like that!
THANK YOU! This has driven me crazy about LED Christmas lights for years, to the point that I've largely stuck with incandescents despite spending hours every year hunting for dead bulbs. It's nice to know I'm not the only person who's felt that way. I'll have to check out the Tru-Tone lights when they're back on sale this winter.
Thanks for agreeing with my distain for modern led xmas lights and the mention of Tru-Tone. I grew up putting up 50s era C9 and C7 strings up in the family home the 80s with my dad. Moved to mini light strings when the vintage strings started shedding wire insulation. Would love to get back into C9s with the LED replacements!
This has bugged me for a long time. 8 years ago I got my first strand of individually addressable RGB LED lights and started experimenting with an Arduino and a few other boards to get them to light up exactly the way I want. Change the code to change the colours and patterns. So much easier than paint. Flickering effects can be done really nicely as well. There are various libraries people have written to make this very easy to do.
Wait, you can replicate the warmth of incandescent color lights by manipulating RGBs???
I guess in this case nostalgia>technology.
@@brittany16950 You can reasonably approximate it.
@@brittany16950 Yes, you absolutely can, and it's very easy.
WLED is the best neopixel software.
Nail varnish is awesome.
Some of my most cherished memories are of painting fishing lures with my grandfather, picking from the 20+ cheap pots in the jig box to get just the right look.
They're also great for marking fasteners for "Been torqued" or "someone tampered...", doing inlay work on polyhedral dice, painting minifigs, etc etc.
I'll have to add "frosted light filter coat" to the toolkit!
I'm glad to see someone else who don't like the narrow spectrum of light that LED-lights have. I also noticed that the blue lights seem to be the strongest, casting your garden in a blue glow. I'd like to make my own but I'd skip the blue entirely I think. I'd like to have red, green and golden yellow lights together. That'd be great.
Cheap polish is really good as well because it usually is very sheer on nails, so great for letting light through.
I will say, I’d love a purple/teal set. I do love those two colors.
"This ain't gonna stop me from seeking perfection."
You go, my man!
I was raised on strings of the C9 bulbs wired in series, and we kept re-using the same strands of lights for almost 30 years before the line literally broke.
Finally, a few years ago, I found the strings with C9 LED lights, that were so much cooler than the old fire hazard strings.
Oddly enough, we used the C9 bulbs for the tree, but the C7 strands for outdoor lighting.
The very first tree I remember though was one of those aluminum foil trees that you shone the floodlight with the four color spinner at to change the color of the tree, and it was really prettier than it sounds.
My aunt had an artificial white flocked tree that she used a colored strand of bulbs on, and covered the strands with some sort of spun fiberglass that gave each bulb a halo effect, she used the red green yellow blue strands, but always only had dark blue ceramic teardrop ornaments on that white tree, it was so stunning.
Can you elaborate on the aluminum foil tree? I have never even heard of such a thing and am having difficulty even imagining it or what to search. I do believe i have seen the spinny light tho, in person no less
@@Palmtop_User en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_Christmas_tree There you go.
@@frenchfriar thank you
13:21 Yes!!! Changing the color combinations is a great idea 🙂 Then we could use red, pink, and whites for Valentine’s Day; spring pastels for Easter; light and dark greens for St Patrick’s day; and red, white and blue for Fourth of July. And just any combo at any time we like to suit our fancy would be a great thing to be able to do!
maybe you could even have clear ones with feathers for fairylights
I didn't realize how much I want spring pastel lights until now. That sounds lovely
back in the days when we had light bulb drip paint we used to do that. sadly those paints stopped over 30 ys ago when coloured light bulbs became cheaper. My family used to dye light bulbs for Christmas and for outdoors in summer
In the UK, what you were calling "mini lights" we'd just call Christmas lights, or in general just "fairy lights". Even before the LED ones they've always had a transformer in the plug, so yes you're correct that we don't run 240V through tiny cheap bulbs with narrow wires, outdoors. Ours also don't have the weird plugs at both ends thing that your guys' lights have, there's just a plug at one end, and if you need more lights you either buy a longer set, or just plug both sets straight into the wall, not into each other.
Those passthrough sockets would not be allowed for outdoor installations under UK law as they lack an approved weatherproof enclosure to protect the socket from water ingress.
@@seraphina985 In "Murica we go "hold my beer" and plug six of them end to end.
@@jamesvandamme7786 To be fair as much as have my criticisms when it comes to America that isn't actually that shocking. I have literally seen 4 of those heavy bricks hanging out of an outlet with the sheer weight alone causing the whole mess to bend downwards and leave a full 1cm gap between the top first adapter and the outlet. Not sure whether your claim of six is hyperbole or not but that pretty much loaded the socket to the max, any further and the electrical connection likely would have broken. The adapter closest to the outlet was probably barely energised by the skin of the outlets teeth at that point. Considering that I actually convinced my friend to let me open the outlet to inspect it and the ends of the internal contacts were warped like limp plastic instead of copper I suspect that probably is close to the truth also. I really do doubt that copper would plastically deform under that relatively small mechanical stress unless ohm heating helped to lower it's elastic limit.
Sorry I just realised I replied to a reply on a different comment I made so that is why it makes no sense sorry lol.
@@jamesvandamme7786 I’m picturing this as you shouting “whoo!” whilst shooting a revolver into the air at the same time
This video is a perfect example of why diversity in science is so important.
It would have taken other groups of people, who regularily wear nail polish, probably less than 3 years to take a shot at doing this with nail polish (probably on the fact alone, that it would have been more readily available than other paints).
The same obviously applys to you as well, who, given your background will figure out good solutions to certain problems way differently and/or quicker than other people.
The same applys to a lot of other problems and different social, cultural, or age groups, which is why it is so important to have scientists from as many backgrounds as possible.
I'm happy you have a good solution to your christmas light problem now :)
In Europe, or at least in Italy, we have very small incandescent lights in a heat shrink tube: they run at 2 to 3 volts and a strand is powered by a 240 to 24Vac transformer so there is no risk of electric shock.
I love your videos btw.
I've been waiting YEARS for a decently colored LED C9 set! Can't wait to check em out and see how they stack up. Thanks for the heads up!
I own hundred of them now
Yes, we had outdoor sets like that in the uk- in fact, there’s still a set laying around somewhere. Ours (from the late ‘80s, I imagine) had rubber collars around the base of the bulb to give some degree of weather tightness, and spares can still be had.
I seem to recall Big Clive did a video some years back where he had designed a 3D- printable cap for led string lights, vaguely reminiscent of the old 12 bulb olive lamp sets for indoor use that another comment has mentioned. Oddly enough, these could be bought in Woolworth’s rather as you suggest- a bulbless string which you then populated by choosing your own bulbs, many of which were ‘figural’, being blown into shapes such as snowmen, Chinese lanterns, horrifying Father Christmas heads and so on.
I was going to mention Big Clive's annual Poundland lights review.
So you could mix and match holidays? Cool.
This is probably my favorite ongoing series of your videos. I don't even have a place of my own to decorate with lights but it's delightful every time.
I don't know, he didn't explain how refrigeration works again so I'm a little lost
Commenting before watching the whole video:
I've been through this for an art project; In major art stores they sell paint for making fake "stained glass". It doesn't hold up on incandescent bulbs... It burns.
But it should work on LEDs just fine.
There ARE xmas LED light strings with in-line FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIERS and are much more tolerable. Not the cheap kind that has a ~29V DC output, these things carry mains to the end so you can chain ~30 strands of 100 LEDs together at 2 rectifiers and 50 LEDs per strand in parallel. The search term for these is "full wave".
12:42 Poland here.
Decorating your house is less of a thing, and even decorating a tree outside is rather niche thing.
That said, 240V run though series as-cheap-as-possible lightbulbs was a thing, and did cause a lot of concerns.
I do remember indoor lights in similar format, but it was like one 40-50yo set that I never used.
In you're neighboring country (germany) we mostly have low voltage strings that use a transformer to step the voltage down to usually 24V
@@techtastisch7569 But to be honest, the Chinese "killing your customers after they've paid is fine"-style light strings with 20 LEDs and a handful of resistors in series directly over 240V are readily available, too.
Yeah we used to have the 240v outdoor sets here's in the UK something like 30 years ago. They are all in the sub 30v range now.
Im Switzerland it's quite common to have "party lights" which are a bit rounder than C9 on 230V. (small E27 bulbs, if that screw socket norm is also common in the 110V countries).
The Sockets for these lights are simply screwed on a two pole flat cable, where to power the socket the insulation is pierced with two pointed screws. The Socket is well insulated but if someone decides to move the Sockets a bit you would end up with a cable with holes in it 😉
In fairness these Lights are more a thing in summer for the right ambiance in a open air bar or so, but you could also usecthem for christmas lighting.
But then its also a thing to put burning Candles on our christmas Trees at home. (I heard from my Grandfather, that in some US States you are not allowed to do that).
@@techtastisch7569 Same in Estonia, likely sourced from same places in China if I had to guess.
I just thought about this 'series' again the other day. So happy there's a new installment!
This channel is pushing the cutting edge of cutesy dorm room projects. If I had been 3 years younger watching this video I would have been painting mini lights for my college dorm all November long
OMG. I feel so seen lol. I have been feeling equally upset about this for years! I'm so glad I'm not the only one & also I could cry from finding out about the LED C9. You have no idea what you've done haha. Thank you so much. I hope for all our sakes the industry finally figures this out.
This video couldn't have better timing. I was digging around in the attic and found an old set of C9 sting lights from my childhood. I found it by stepping on a bulb hearing that iconic "pop" sound. Funny part was, I immediately started to her Mavis Staples - Christmas Vacation playing in my head. Ahh the simple things in life, lol.
If you're looking for a good paint to colour the LEDs try duplicolor metalcast. Comes in many colours that are very rich and hold up well outside. I used this to paint the bulb for a pool and it held up underwater for 3 years before the bulb burnt out. Paint was still fine.
Lovely as ever mate. I've added your "by the magic of buying two of them" to my projects and my headaches have reduced so far. And hey! who doesn't like spares! cheers and have a lovely holiday season!
I've hoarded hundreds of vintage, painted glass bulbs from the 1970s and 1980s, along with their accompanying sockets/wires. These are my Christmas lights. They're the best. The luminous, but soft glow of solid colors is just a sight to behold. I LOVE them. It's only a few months out of the year, so I can live with them not being energy efficient. They're perfect to fall asleep to during the holiday season.
Tbh, Haven't even put up any decorations for a few years. That said, I appreciate all the research that went into this and past years videos. It's becoming a tradition watching!
Thanks you! Happy hololoblboblobllb!!!
We had these C9 lights on the Christmas tree when I was a little kid. They used American voltage so we also had a transformer, which got hot very quickly, so we could only leave them switched on for a few minutes at a time.
My grandpa probably got them in the late 50s or 60s, maybe from an American military shop. We might even still have them somewhere in the attic.
Or you could connect two strings in series and skip the transformer (assuming you had two 😉).
I love your obsession with Christmas lights. I too feel that they are the most important part of the holiday and cringe when driving through my neighborhood and being forced to view the holiday decorating failures on many a lawn.
I love the colors of LED lights, and I love the brightness, I love everything about them except the flickering. So much worse when you drive by in a car also.
Yup, I'm sticking with incandescents until the directional brightness, evenness of brightness, overall brightness, flickering, and color gamut issues are reliably fixed in a brand of LED lights. I kinda like a six or seven color light set (with orange, magenta, and maybe purple for the extra colors -- no teal), but I understand the dislike of the colors beyond the basic four.
There isn't going to be any technical advancement in the LEDS you buy in the big box stores. Basically if a good set that costs $25 dollars is next to a lousy cheap one that costs $15 dollars, the $15 set will vastly outsell the $25 and the $25 dollar set will never be brought to market. The general public doesn't really know or care about uniformity or color gamut. They want the cheapest possible product. The absolute cheapest cost of materials and construction even if it is fractions of a penny per lamp will be all that matters to both the manufacturer and the store buyers. So all we are ever going to see are half wave rectified, monochromatic color leds, with the shape of plastic the LED is illuminating being the only marketable difference.
The best improvement on your method would probably be dipping the bulbs instead of brushing them. This would also be the closest to how "real" painted bulbs are made at the factory.
The "hard" part of this method would be moving your paint color into a container where you could dip the entirety of the bulb up to the base without any interference, but the results should be much more even than with a brush (Air powered or traditional).
I concur, do you concur?
I mean if you’re just doing the little bulbs, you could just dip them into the nail polish bottle. I wonder if they’re a similar enough size that you’d “cap” the bottle so you could turn it upside down to fully coat the bulb? I don’t know if nail polish bottles have an actual standard size.
“Why didn’t I concur?”
An airbrush with a 0.5mm needle and a good distance from spray to bulb would give a pretty even and quick coating.
Re the mains voltage thoughts: Here in Iceland (and I believe the rest of Scandinavia) we've always used full-size 240V 40W E27 bulbs, which have colored glass, and as such are always beautiful.
These ginormous lights pretty much were the only exterior lighting option for all houses and trees for decades. As you would expect, should one of these bulbs break due to... anything... you've basically got full live 240V open to the elements. And fingers. Which is particularly fun if you're digging between the branches looking for that one bulb that's out, but it's Iceland so it's pitch black 20 hours a day and your only illumination are the other bulbs on the tree so you can't really pull the plug. 😁
But at least them being in parallel means that one or even 49 out of 50 bulbs can go out without any issues or effects for the working bulbs.
Gleðileg jól! I tend to think of Scandinavians as being superior in both safety and energy efficiency. This is giving me some cognitive dissonance. I guess you can blame such problems on the jólasveinar, no?
@@squirlmy Hah, incandescent bulbs have been outlawed here for a decade or more, so we're stuck with our annoyingly efficient and safe LED lights these days. 😅
But the 240V lights are perfectly safe. Just don't poke the sockets with a screwdriver (or a finger) unless you're actively trying to test if it's plugged in or not. 😁
Yep we have these in Finland!
@@ArniVidar I think there are incandescent replacement bulbs for them still, atleast there were a few years ago
@@squirlmy we have no choice, our government is our nanny, even single use plastic cutlery is banned
Pro tip: shop for your green nail polish around Halloween. There's lots of deep, witchy greens to be had.
You should have started by talking to my mother.....
When I was young, in the 60s, we still had a very old c7 light string, old enough to only have about 10 sockets on the wire....as well as some chunky blocks that were probably, in retrospect, fuses! We used this antique for the few remaining shaped christmas bulbs we had left (4 kids and a dog). There was a santa bulb, and I recall a train car, and a few others. AND there was a reminder of when my mother was young, during WW2, with supply shortages making luxuries like christmas bulbs hard to find. Her solution (or her parents...) was to use a C7 sewing machine bulb, still available in clear, and.....wait for it.....paint it red with nail polish.
And decades later, despite the searing C7 heat (7 watts per bulb, I believe, those bigger C9s were 9 watts for outdoors) it was still looking pretty good.
Regarding bulb removal....when I was young(er) I made an illuminated sign for a neighborhood event. It said MERRY CHRISTMAS and the construction paper letters on cardboard were studded with early and cheap small bulb sets...and to end up with the needed number of lights, maybe 10 per letter, I used an assortment of different size sets....35s, 50s, maybe a 100. Of course I pulled all the little bulbs (with their two exposed wire lead contacts on the base) so the sockets could be behind the cardboard, and the bulbs went in from the front. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess. Only after did I learn, when the sign lit up with some dim bulbs and some glaringly bright ones, that the electrical design at the time was to use bulbs wired in series to get to approximately 120 volts per string....so the seemingly identical bulbs varied in voltage ratings, some about 3 volts and others lower. I was lucky the hotter brighter bulbs didn't cause a fire.
And I suppose you were supposed to keep the spare bulbs in the little baggie, along with the twinkle-causing bulb, separate from all the OTHER little baggies from different voltage sets...
My wish list for holiday lights would be the translucent C7 twinkle incandescent bulbs that GE used to make.
Each one had a little bimetallic strip inside, which broke the bulb circuit when heated, then restored it when cooled. Back then, when I still had working ears, you could sit near the tree in a quiet room and hear a chorus of little metal chiming bells, almost, as they went off and on. It was magical! But of course they stopped making them, or changed sources, and the last time I tried ordering GE bulbs or others that promised to Twinkle....they were sadly silent, and in fact barely twinked at all.
The Christmas light videos are some of my favorites! Thanks Alec.
I honestly look forward to these videos from you every Christmas! I am 1000000% with you on the garish colors of colored LED mini-lights. I avoid them like the plague too. And it really bums me out because I'd love to be able to commit to a large set of multicolored lights for outside.
Really excited to hear about the C7/C9 bulb company you mentioned! They're the chosen ones as far as I'm concerned, and I just learned about them. I'm a web guy, I'll offer to help with their SEO problems for free if it gets them the momentum it needs!
Keep fighting the good fight!
I love this video! I appreciate people who get deeply into the details. And NO, you are NOT the only person annoyed by the bright eye-searing blue-purple LEDs!
Twinkly smart Christmas lights solved the obnoxiously glaringly bright colour issues on LED lights for me this year. You use an app to adjust the colours and brightness (including to much nicer muted tones), plus there’s many different transitions and effects available (or you can make your own).
You can also set them up by scanning the lights with your phone’s camera in the app so it maps the LEDs to their position on the tree so you can do some fancy things with the lighting that way. Very neat.
We also use Twinkly lights. The "Multicolor + White edition" strings could probably satisfy whatever color optimizations one would want.
The only thing those lights remind me of every year is the fact that they flicker at gird frequency
I can even see it on camera (30fps, what shutter speed did you use?). So annoying... I wish every LED light manufacturer, no matter what kind of light, would put a "FULL BRIDG ERECTIFIUH" on top of the circuit
I read that last bit in *ElectroBOOM’s* voice.
you can retrofit a FULL BRIDGE RECIFIER in the form of an in-between plug, that would work in one orientation and not in the other. However care must be taken that no genuine AC appliance is plugged into this.
There are safer variations of this theme depending on the level of DIY you are willing to go.
As a European, I was quite surprised to hear about flickering Christmas LED lights. Don't they all come with a DC adapter?
Holy Moly! As someone who has been subbed less than a year (and admittedly hasn't finished watching your backlog of previous videos), I am SO happy to hear someone else sharing my irritation at heavily saturated monochromatic blue Christmas lights!
I've been talking to everyone (they just don't get it) about this since LED Christmas lights started to catch on here in Australia!
I've been subbed from VERY early on and it's freaky to be reminded just how long he's been freaking out about these lights.
Honest question: what's wrong with monochromatic blue? (or other colors)?
Is this just a matter of subjective taste, or can you describe it in more detail?
@@zephsmith3499 The monochromatic colors tend to be very cool (cold even, in the case of blue), whereas the traditional, older lights have a warmth to them that LEDs just cannot mimic without some work/expense (neither of which the traditional consumer will tolerate, but I sure as hell would pay for). The current generation of LED Christmas lights make my brain bleed. At least *some* manufacturers are fully rectifying their sets so they don't strobe (as much.. LEDs still have a cutoff voltage so they are off for a fraction of a second, and I'm one of the unlucky ones that can see that).
@@zephsmith3499 A certain bright twinkle of white incandescent light within the blue glass results in an assortment of hues and intensities. A complex display of the filament's warmth against the soft dark blue bulb. Its why I love incandescent "fairy" Christmas lights to this day. In addition, cheap LED lights often will have a very mild but disorienting strobe, which is especially noticeable indoors, and there is a certain lost beauty in the stark monochromatic color compared to that bright twinkle set in a colored frame.
I recommend Technology Connections' video on RGB where he shows how an absence of white light and only one color will effectively render huge swathes of a scene eerily dark, while the broad emittance of white light, even through a colored bulb, allows for much greater detail in a lit scene.
@@DasPlayer2 Thanks for answering. I will look for his video on that.
I agree about the flicker, particularly in the box store half wave led lights. I seem to be somewhat more sensitive to this than average (because sometimes I mildly complain and my companion sees no problem).
One can buy full wave lights online, but I have also used a full wave rectifier inline to convert half way strings to full wave (pay attention to power dissipation issues tho). Another factor in flicker is how many LEDs are in each series string - typically around 33 or around 50. The more LEDs in series, the higher their combined Vfwd, meaning that they illuminate for shorter period of time on each half cycle (when the AC voltage is higher). In other words, AC flicker is an issue but can be mitigated fairly well. (However, most of my LED lights are actually running DC with higher frequency PWM anyway, which is not so visible).
Back to color hues - which would affect even non-flickering DC driven LEDs.
"A certain bright twinkle of white incandescent light within the blue glass results in an assortment of hues and intensities. A complex display of the filament's warmth against the soft dark blue bulb."
Interesting. Just as I appear to be somewhat more sensitive to flicker than some folks, I may be less sensitive to this factor.
It would be interesting to do some testing with multiple volunteers to get a better sense of how common this kind of discernment is.
And, without any negative implications, I am struck by how similar your description is to the kinds of things that vinyl lovers say regarding digital music.
Anyway, thanks for explaining and I'll try to find more in TC's video specifically on the subject.
THanks!! I'm just now discovering TruTone lights, and most are sold out now. I'm for sure going to be getting some for next year!!
Try using clear Elmer's glue mixed with food coloring. You can adjust the amount of food coloring to create any color you want. You can also use the white glue if you want more of a frosted look.
Elmers is water soluble so I wouldn’t be using those outdoors.
@@eliasross4576 He already has a uv clear coat spray to put on the outdoor ones.
@@BIGNICK620 it's not the UV that's the problem it's the water solubility + rain that is
@@synthgal1090 I think the idea is that the UV coating will also protect against rain. That's a dicey proposition with a sprayed-on coating, but it ought to work if you apply it via dipping.
One thing to consider looking into is jelly nail polish (not to be confused with gel nail polish), which is intentionally more transparent, instead of having the frosted look of normal "creme" nail polish. I'm also kind of curious to see what would happen if a glittery nail polish was used on lights bulbs like this - I'll have to give it a try myself!
I'm obsessed with real colors too. Philips made some when LED lights were new that had perfect colors (and no purple!). I bought three strands and wish I got more because I have yet to see anything like them.
Also next year you should try plasti-dip, like the kind in the cans that plier handles and other tools are dipped into (not the spray). I think it might hit the happy medium between opaque and transparent, and it should be very durable.
Companies have experimented, including in China, and there are about a dozen or so visible LED colours now. Partly through them emitting different frequencies (they're still mostly monochromatic), and partly through messing about with phosphors. Nothing to stop you getting a load of LEDs, sticking a resistor to each leg, and running them all in parallel off 5V from a USB adaptor. Nice and safe, and 10mA is plenty for an LED, actually 3 or 4mA might be better if you want them dim. So you should be able to run a shitload of them off one USB.
You could even put a few ultraviolet ones in and paint some decorations with UV nail polish. It's the harmless kind of UV. In fact you could do one string entirely of UV and see how that sets things off.
which set is it? ive been looking for one for a while and can't find any lol
"Phil Swift here with "Flex Seal."
Nail polish and model paints (the enamel kinds) are the same exact paint with different mixtures. I actually use nail polish on my models sometimes
I had a thought when you mentioned fabric dye. You could try using hair dye. Every time I add more purple or green to my hair I have to bleach my shower multiple times because it stains so effectively. Manic Panic is pretty common, but there are a bunch of other brands (I personally use good dye young for my hair, but that's a bit expensive for experimenting).
Also yeah, green nail polish seems to be super uncommon, with very little variety. It's either neon, or almost black
I bought a REALLY expensive Revlon pot in emerald and I searched for months for that. So totally agree
I a dude with dark hair. Thanks for the remarks. I want to try some of this dyeness to darken the plastic gutter clips I like which are white.
I have only now discovered that this is a whole series but I am THRIVING. I've been screaming about LED lights being hideous for YEARS.
I'm amazed by how far you're digging into this subject, and bringing us all with you on that journey !
I wonder if window colors would work, the kind that are usually for creating rubbery and repositionable window art.
I'm really enjoying this becoming annual tradition. and I am glad I'm not the only person that misses the orange old school glow of the non led lights from back in the day! think I might have to get some nail polish!
i remember once painting them with window color paints, worked well
THANK YOU! I can see all the display lights at Home Depot flickering but it seems nobody else can, I thought I was crazy!
Yes we definitely had mains voltage outdoor christmas lights in 240v land.
Indeed. We just have adapter plugs that down the voltage to 12v before sending it down the string
@@daemonbyte I'm talking long before that was a thing.
There is a higher quality solution available for this. All you need is either leather or wood dyes, alcohol based. And some nitrocellulose lacquer - matte if you want matte, glossy if you need glass like transparency. Mix an larger amount of dye (say, 10ml), with about 50ml of lacquer. Stir nicely and just put your bulbs in it for a second.