Richard Hamilton Posted June 11, 2008 Share Posted June 11, 2008 Hi Folks,It's soon going to be that time of year again. I'd appreciate hearing from people about your suggestions for where you bought LED strings and your experience if it has been good.I have to make a LARGE purchase of about 1,000 strings (or more) for a project I am doing to setup an LOR system at a shopping mall in Texas this year. You know those Texans.... they do things in a big way ;-)Since this is a commercial installation, I'm interested in higher quality LEDs. Ideally, I would hope for some C7 or C9 full-wave rectified strings so there will be less flicker and I won't have to use any snubbers to keep the fades smooth.Cheers to everyone, and thank you for your thoughts.Richard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rrader Posted June 12, 2008 Share Posted June 12, 2008 Wow Richard, sounds like you're really ramping thing up this year! Does this mean you won't be doing your own display at home? Hopefully that's not the case, but if you need help, let me know.As far as the LED lights go, I would check with Paul at Creative Displays. His LEDs seem to be regarded as some of the better ones out there. I purchased a bunch of M5 strings from him last year but ended up not using them in my display. If you want to check them out drop me a line and I'll swing by with a few sets.Ralph Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Hamilton Posted June 12, 2008 Author Share Posted June 12, 2008 rrader wrote: Wow Richard, sounds like you're really ramping thing up this year! Does this mean you won't be doing your own display at home? Hopefully that's not the case, but if you need help, let me know.As far as the LED lights go, I would check with Paul at Creative Displays. His LEDs seem to be regarded as some of the better ones out there. I purchased a bunch of M5 strings from him last year but ended up not using them in my display. If you want to check them out drop me a line and I'll swing by with a few sets.RalphHey Ralph,Good to see you on the board this year. We should meet again before the winter so we can compare notes on things for the year.Yes, we will still have our home display. I'm just making some trips to Texas to help them out with the mall setup. They have local people there to install and maintain. I'm just designing it for them and acquiring the components. I'll be around here for Christmas.Thanks for the recommendation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Jones Posted June 14, 2008 Share Posted June 14, 2008 Richardtake a look at Travis' product at led holiday lighting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Hamilton Posted August 19, 2008 Author Share Posted August 19, 2008 Dr. Jones wrote: Richardtake a look at Travis' product at led holiday lightingQuite some time has passed since I made the original posting, but I have new information on this topic so I thought I'd come back and post it. I hope this doesn't sound like an advertisement, cos it is really just a recommendation based on my experience in the last couple of months.We looked at a lot of light sets for a combination of quality, features, price, availability, and company support. Happily I can say there are a few good places out there and I see a couple of them mentioned in this thread and other threads.For a variety of reasons, we placed our order with Travis. The sample string tested very well with LOR and does not flicker during fades. Therefore, no snubbers are needed. Also there is no "perpheral vision flicker" since they are full-wave rectified, hence they also appear slightly brighter. The cost is good and he had some long 24 feet long strings with 70 bulbs that will make our installation easier. After all, we have to install 800 strings of lights.I don't expect we will have much of any winter weather problems in Texas where this display will be going up, but just for the fun of it, I drowned the lights in a bucket of water just to see if I could blow up my house! Well, that was not really the reason. I actually wanted to measure leakage current. Then I dried they off thoroughly and started forcing out the bulbs to look for hints of internal water penetration. After all, it isn't the life of the bulbs that matters with LEDs. Choosing a 50,000 bulb over a 10,000 hour bulb makes little difference if these things are outside in the rain. It's the rusting of internal contacts that will kill the string after a couple of seasons. Well, surprisingly on the lights I tested, a tiny amount of water penetrated only 3 of the 70 bulbs. I was expecting over half the bulbs to show signs of water penetration. And I was expecting large leakage currents, but there wasn't. Your mileage will vary! Of course the 110 VAC ends of most any string will be vulnerable unless you get the commerical style strings.The one thing that was the icing on the cake with Travis was his responsiveness. Replies were very fast and all the information was at hand.Summary, there appear to be some good lightly sets out there this year. We like the ones from Travis, but there are probably others too. The real rubber will meet the road when we get them up and see how they perform. I'll probably be back in January to report on that.Good luck to everyone on their displays this year, and thank you to the people who helped with recommendations.RGH Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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