Question for you LED experts

[Bob Wingert]

I've read somewhere's that you never connect a 50ct Incan to a 100ct, it will shorten the life, right? Does this same rule apply to LED's? I do have a shortage from all my preorders. Was looking at purchasing these:

http://www.homedepot.com/Decor-Holiday-Decorations-Christmas-Lights/h_d1/N-5yc1vZ1xqwZbd6tZ1z11erc/R-100686912/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

What I need to know is this; can I hook these 250CT into my other strings which are 70ct? They are both M5's. The 70cts are from CDI.

The other part of this is; Is purchasing a huge strand like 250ct on a single strand, good idea? Are there drawbacks to doing this? Would it be better to go with more 70cts even though the price would be much higher

[-klb-]

Actually, the limit is to not interchange bulbs from 35/70 count strings with bulbs from 50/100 count strings. You should be fine mixing and matching whole strings, but it becomes more difficult to ensure that you are putting in the correct replacement bulb when you have them mixed..

Plugging multiple LED strings of different lengths together should be zero issue..

[chuckd]

The socket at the end of a strand is directly wired to the plug at the beginning, so there's no issue with the number of lights (that's why there are three wires and not two). The reason there is a maximum 'consecutive strand' count is due to the gauge of the wire, and how much current you can pull through wires that are the size of our light strands.

KLB is right, the issue you're probably thinking of is substituting bulbs that come from different length strands, and in most of the sealed LED configurations this is not an issue. If for some reason you have replaceable LED bulbs, then a bigger issue can be the actual color of the LED itself, since different color LED's drop different voltages across them.

But without getting too technical here, you've got nothing to worry about with stringing different count light strands end-to-end other than the maximum current the wires can handle.

[Steven]

chuckd wrote:

The socket at the end of a strand is directly wired to the plug at the beginning,

Not always. I have a bunch of LED strings from several different manufacturers in which the full-wave rectifier sits between the plug at the beginning and the socket at the end. The socket at the end has unfiltered DC instead of AC.

This was actually helpful in one case where the rectifier in one string went bad, so I just cut it off and wired it directly to the end of the first string (paying careful attention to polarity).