Sylvania LED Icicle Lights

[Lou Knudson]

Anyone else had problems with Sylvania LED Icicle Lights? We bought ten sets of them several years ago and they had been working fine. We recently took them out of storage in our garage as we are working on setting up our display.

We found most of the LED's had rusted and fallen out of the sockets. The the sockets also have rusty colored stains on them. These are supposed to be for outdoor use, but the pins on the LED's actually rusted off. We did not store them any differently as in past years and never had the problem before.

We purchased ten new sets of the Sylvania lights to replace them and had problems with three of them only being partially lit right out of the box. They were supposed to be blue LED's, but two sets had some clear LED's mixed in. The new sets seem to be somewhat redesigned so we are hoping for better results this time.

[LENNY RUEL]

Lou:

It's called galvanic corrosion and happens when two disimilar metals are in contact with each other as until March 1st of this year the majority of LED's had. It shows up more so on the brick and mortar store brands as most of them are unsealed which of course allows moisture into the socket. The tabs in the sockets are copper as in regular light strings but the LED lead wires are usually tinned mild steel. March 1st the UL standard was changed and the plants in China where to start using similar copper for leads as well. Don't know IF this is showing up on store shelves yet this year. I have about 600 running feet of C6 and C7 LED's I bought from Fleet Farm and this will be the third year on them. I paste my leads with dielectric grease so I don't have that corrosion problem. Of course this requires pulling each bulb out of the socket, but my lights work. And I'm constantly being asked how I keep mine on when others have had the same problem as yourself. Of course they also don't dim and frankly I'm not trusting in the fact that many of the big box LED's will do this and do it right. So now that I made the decision to start crossing over my elements to LED's, I'll continue to buy the professional grade strings from Paul at CDI as I did this year.

Lenny