Christmas Trees With Multi Colored Lights

It's happened to all of us. We've spent hours during the holiday season perfectly planning and hanging holiday lights on our Christmas tree. Suddenly, we find ourselves experiencing a Clark Griswold moment, and we spend additional hours searching for the source of the burned-out Christmas lights. Rather than giving up and driving to the store to buy a whole set of new ones, here's how to fix Christmas lights once and for all. It's easier and more affordable than you might think!

Find the Source of the Power Outage

These days, most holiday mini lights aren't meant to last forever. They're only designed to make it through about three seasons tops (about 1,000 to 1,500 hours). But if you find your Christmas lights conking out on you earlier than that, there's likely an easy fix. When you discover a broken strand of lights, try to determine what's causing the lack of juice. Here are the most common causes.

Chewed Wires

Bad news: Squirrels and mice are strangely attracted to something in the wire, and they will go to town on them if they have the chance. If you see frayed or chewed wires of any kind, you should throw them away immediately. We can all agree that it's better to buy a new strand than get electrocuted by rogue wires, right?

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Blown Fuses

Behind a small door in the male end of your strand's socket are a number of small silver fuses. These can get overheated and stop working. Whenever you purchase a box of lights, they generally come with a small packet of replacement bulbs and an extra fuse or two. Use a small screwdriver to open the small latch and be careful to not let them fall out when you do. There are electrical tools as well as fuse testers out there that you can purchase to test which specific fuse is the problem.

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Light Bulb Connection

Sometimes a fix is as easy as looking to see if any of the light bulbs on your ailing strand aren't pushed down into the connector enough. If the fine wires on the end of a light bulb aren't able to connect to the power source, a loose connection is probably your culprit.

Clear Replacement Bulbs

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Broken Bulbs

If all is well with your fuses and all the lights are pressed securely in their spots, it's time to assume that the problem lies with one or more of your light bulbs. Luckily, replacement bulbs are easy to come by and cheap! You can also keep a "sacrificial strand" on hand—any time you need extra bulbs, you can pull them from this strand that's around solely for use as replacements.

It's the Bulb…But Which One?

You've determined that the problem is a bulb. Sometimes you can actually see the very bulb that has stopped working, but on most sets of lights, if one bulb is out, they're all out. Because the strands work on a circular electrical system where electricity flows through all the light bulbs and then returns to the power source, it's often one bulb (or sometimes several) that ruin things for all of them.

Thankfully, there are tools out there that can help you determine which bulb is the problem child. One of the most highly recommended tools is the Light Keeper Pro. It's the Cadillac of bulb testers, having a place to test voltage, fuses, shunts, and even a place to test the bulb to see if it'll light up. If you'd rather not take out every light from its socket, or prefer something without all the bells and whistles, there are mini light testers that you can hover over any light and see if voltage is going to it. Once you find the one without voltage, you can replace the bulb and see if that does the trick!

Christmas Light Tester

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Know When to Get New Christmas Lights

If after all of this, you still aren't seeing the light (pun intended), then it might just be time to pitch those lights into the garbage and head out for an affordable new set. And going forward, you've got the knowledge to keep those strands juiced up for a few more holiday seasons.

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