Megatree 10' need help

[fhuggins98]

I bought a new 16 channel for a mega-tree. But i'm not sure how many different colors i can do or how many strings i should use.

[caniac]

fhuggins98 wrote:

I bought a new 16 channel for a mega-tree. But i'm not sure how many different colors i can do or how many strings i should use.

sorta depends on the sequence or sequences you use. bought a 32 channel starter pack from wowlights last year and a handful of their sequences. those were setup for 16 channels of one color. You have 16 channels to play with so the possiblities are only limited by your imagination.

number of strings is dependent on whether you use incandescent or LED. I think the controller has an amperage limitation. LED's use fewer AMP's.

[Denise Nelson]

fhuggins98 wrote:

I bought a new 16 channel for a mega-tree. But i'm not sure how many different colors i can do or how many strings i should use.

Since you have 16 channels, you can use 16 different colors... Use one channel for the star on the tree. That will leave you with 15 channels for the rest of the tree. But since there are not 15 different Christmas colors to choose from, you can use like red, green, blue, yellow purple, pink and white; then stripe your tree according to how many colors you are going to use. Make sure that you will end up with even number of colors and stripes.

I currently have a 20' flat tree up against my barn; using 11 channels with 3 different colors of mini lights that I striped: (from left to right) blue, purple, gold, blue, purple, gold (center), purple, blue, gold, purple and blue. Each color has 9 strands that are 21' long = of 99 strings. You have to keep a watch on the amps for each channel. Since I am using 9 strings each color, each set of 9 is about 1.60amps per channel. That left me 5 channels open for the animated drummer boy (3 channels) and 2 for the star. (Read the manual on amps per channel.)

Hope this helps you a little. Check out PlanetChristmas.com for further help on amperage and how-to's if you haven't already.

Good Luck!

[TJ Hvasta]

For a 10' MT, you can go with 2 colors.. Red/Green, or Green/White, or any two colors you can lay hands on.. 8channels per color, doing an Up & Over will give you 16 slices(legs) per color and make it look full enough and gives you a really nice spinning look. It's the best layout for small channel counts... You can also try three colors.. Red/Green/White, 5 channels per color and use the 16th channel for the star.. Do the same Up/Over with the strings.

[Denise Nelson]

pikadroo wrote:

I have spun trees with as little as 5 channels but it was a 7.5 foot tree. I dunno what the difference would be.

Drew

As they say, size doesn't matter. It's what you want your tree to do. Some displays use way more than 48 channels to one tree! It all depends on how you want it to "dance" to the music. The more channels, the more "dancing" effects you can create. Go to "Showcase" in LOR website and watch some of the spectacular shows with tons of channels and you will understand what it can do to a tree - no matter what the height is.