Christmas Lights Decorating: Know Your Bulbs
An Easy How-to Guide for Buying Christmas Light Sets and Bulb
Nov 13, 2008
“Let’s get some Christmas lights!” It sounds like fun, but choosing lights can be confusing.
C7 Lights and C9 Liights
The most traditional lights are called C7s and C9s. These lamps have long, tapered bulbs shaped like flames.
The main difference between C7s and C9s is that the latter are bigger. Depending on the manufacturer, a C9 can run up to 2 3/4 inches tall, while C7s can get as short as 1 1/2 inches. A C9 uses seven to ten watts of electricity, while C7s take five to seven watts.
C9s are the lamp of choice among some lighters for big objects: roofs, walkways, trees and the outlines of buildings or objects. For smaller items, many light enthusiasts prefer C7s.
Both C7 and C9 lights, especially the C9s, devour power. If you string more than three strands of C9s together, you risk blowing a fuse.
What’s more, C7s and C9s aren’t the best choice to line doorways or windows. The big bulbs can appear handsome from far off but may not look so pretty five inches from a visitor's nose.
Mini-LightsTo avoid these problems, you can buy mini-lights. These tiny creatures are round tubes that taper to a point, like candles. They need only ten to thirty percent as much power as C7s or C9s.
Micro-Lights, Rice Lights, Ultra-Small Lights, Twinkle Lights
Even smaller than mini-lights are little devils that go by various names—micro-lights, ultra-small lights, rice lights and sometimes twinkle lights—but they all have one thing in common: they're teeny, no more than a tenth of an inch or about the size of a grain of rice. "Twinkle lights are most effective when purchased in a single color, such as white or blue," according to journalist J. Scott Wilson, whose syndicated column The Weird Chronicles has covered a range of strange and wonderful things. "If you want to run lights through a hedge or around a tree trunk, the multicolored twinkle lights lose their impact." They're so small that some companies consider them specialty lights, a category for the unusual and faddish.
Pearl Lights
Among the most popular specialties are pearl lights. They do look a little like pearls, if pearls came in red, yellow, green and blue. They somewhat resemble old-style theater footlights, a convenient similarity if you want to make your displays look like stage sets with Santas and snowmen as the actors.
LED Lights
All of the above bulbs have traditionally emitted light by burning a wire filament. LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs are different. According to Forever Bright, a leading manufacturer, "LEDs are constructed from tiny solid-state chips similar to those used in computers. These chips directly convert electricity to light without the use of a filament or glass bulb. Instead, the chips are encapsulated in solid plastic that can be made into a variety of shapes and sizes." Since they use much less power than conventional bulbs, you can attach strand to strand to strand without overloading the socket that powers them. What’s more, they're less of a fire hazard, because they don't get hot. And they're rated to last about 20 years—much longer than regular incandescent lights. Just as transistors eventually replaced the big, bulb-like vacuum tubes that used to run radios, some light experts expect the transistor-like LEDs to replace conventional bulbs.
Light Bulb Safety — and Fun
Whatever you buy, test it as soon as you get it home. Replace any bulbs that don’t work. If you don’t like what you get, make sure that you can return it. Lighting up for the holidays is supposed to be fun, so don’t just get lights that you can turn on; get lights that turn you on.
Happy holidays.
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