Bill Quinn: Hi! I am Bill Quinn with Christmastreeforme. We are talking about how to select
the perfect artificial Christmas tree for your home. Part of that is selecting the
right type of light. Now here we have four different types of lights that could go
on your Christmas tree. These will work obviously for either artificial or for a
fresh tree. This is a standard, if one bulb burns out the rest stay lit light-string.
This a little bit more advanced technology where you can actually pull bulbs out
of the string. This is a little bit more advanced technology, from this also you can
pull bulbs out and then this is the LED light, it will consume about 80-85% less
electricity to burn. This is the string that 90-95% of the lights that you see on a
home, on a Christmas tree garland etc. If one bulb burns out the rest will stay lit,
however, the sentence is never completed and that is if you pull a bulb out, the
light string goes our or if this bulb breaks, cracks, shorts out or is otherwise
damaged in anyway the light string goes out which can definitely create
frustration for you. Next is a little bit more advanced technology, where we can
pull a bulb out and the light is flashed for a moment but then they came back on?
Now, this technology is great.
You can pull out a number of bulbs out of this string and the lights will stay on
however there is one thing that you need to watch for, and that is, this string has
what's called a fuse bulb. This bulb although it is about the same size and shape, it
has a different colored ring that most importantly if this bulb is damaged in
anyway, this whole string will go out and it can't be fixed because you cannot
replace this fuse bulb, it's permanently attached to the string. So in my opinion
that is the significant downside of this particular type of light string. This is the
most advanced mini-light that we know of. This light-string also has the ability to
pull not one but multiple generally up-to five bulbs per string out or they could be
damaged, broken etc and the light string will stay on. You can see how important
this would be if it is on a Christmas tree, if there are bulbs that are off the rest of
the strings stays on, so it's very easy to identify, oh my bulb has fallen out. Lastly,
and this is our favorite for 2008 is the LED light.
They use 80-85% less electricity to burn. But the great thing for this year these
Wide Angle LEDs they have the same color as the traditional mini light and about
the same brightness and years past the way that the LEDs were manufactured was
to be the same kind of size and shape, which was okay but the color that would
come out the light it didn't look good. But most importantly they were so bright
that you felt like you had to wear sunglasses inside every time that you looked at
your Christmas tree and so they have really done a good job this year of fixing
that. Now, the other thing that's great about an LED is the -- in general these may
burn for 3000 hours, these can burn for a 100,000 hours. In addition these are
very, very durable. You can easily break one of these bulbs by dropping them, by
catching them in a branch etc, in a hinge, on an artificial tree. These are very
durable. I have tried, I have worked with them, I have tried to mutilate them and
they do a very good job of surviving.
The other important piece though to understand is that if one these bulbs is
removed from the string and they are very tight in there the string will go out.
However if you think about the fickleness of a traditional mini-light, that
traditional mini light with the one bulb's turn burns out the rest stay lit. This bulb
can very easily short out which we talk about in another video about how the
shunt becomes oxidized; this doesn't have a shunt in it. This does not this bulb is
not as fickle it will not break as easily and so in our opinion the -- due to the, the
lower amount of electricity that's used in these lights, the increased durability of
these lights, that these are a good option. We think that these are a good option as
well.
So in our trees, in our own homes we use either this type of advanced technology
with the micro-chip in the bottom of the socket or we use the LED lights. So in
summary, we have talked about four different types of mini lights that one might
put on their trees, we definitely recommend that you choose from these two types
of lights. And next we are going to talk about how to choose between a realistic
tree and a more traditional manufactured tree.