Help finding reasonably priced LED string lights this year.??

[Rhizzlebop]

Last year I bought 400 (4x100) LED string sets from walmart for $24.  This year, all I can find are 100 sets for more than $10 

I'm probably needing at least 3200 lights, so around 32 sets to do 8 minitrees and 2 giant driveway arches.

 

Any ideas?     I've checked lowes, HD, walmart and nothing reasonable.  Looked at the walmart items I bought last year and it says theya re out of stock, so I dunno if they aren't getting any of those, or if they are sitting on a [Foul Language Used] in San Diego still.

 

Amazon is even higher than walmart.

[TheSignGuy]

You might have to improvise with the incan lights for this year. I'm in the upstate and have some extra's NIB I can spare if you are interested. I'll have to go in and look depending on the colors you are after.

[TheDucks]

26 minutes ago, Rhizzlebop said:

Any ideas?     I've checked lowes, HD, walmart and nothing reasonable.  Looked at the walmart items I bought last year and it says theya re out of stock, so I dunno if they aren't getting any of those, or if they are sitting on a [Foul Language Used] in San Diego still.

Welcome to the post(ish) Covid19 world which has surfaced an amazing number of weaknesses in the way we do business. The Unions fought almost any automation in the ports (last I heard, they walk the rows to find a container to load onto a truck). Semiconductor house now use 'foundries' rather than fight all the regulations for doing it 'in house' like they did in the 70's. And JIT now means there are no storerooms full of parts.  Oh! Spares! Who needs Spares? We want to sell them a new one next year 🥴

FWIW I visited 2 Walmarts for Halloween lights (more than once). People were buying the stuff almost faster than they could unbox the days shipment and get it on the shelf.

[tlogan]

I noticed last year that strings of 50 LED at Walmart were pretty non-existent. Almost all were 100. And I went early enough to actually score some single color net lights. I THINK that Walmart ALWAYS shows Christmas lights as out of stock online as they are in-store only.  At least that 's how it looked when I was trying to find some single color net strings 2 years ago when I couldn't find them in store.

I think that a lot of the decorative stuff we look for is being held up at ports. I noticed this year that the Spirit Store seemed to have about half of what it normally has. Same at Walmart for Halloween stuff. And I DID just cruise through Walmart and looked at the Christmas stuff they have out now and so far it looks like left overs from last year. I had a Facebook memory from two years ago popup yesterday where I mentioned going to Walmart because they already had all their Christmas stuff out, so I'm not too hopeful for this year.

[Rhizzlebop]

On 10/12/2021 at 9:55 AM, TheSignGuy said:

You might have to improvise with the incan lights for this year. I'm in the upstate and have some extra's NIB I can spare if you are interested. I'll have to go in and look depending on the colors you are after.

Hi,
Thanks for the offer.   I bought some stuff at walmart yesterday but I can always return it.  I only found part of what I wanted.

 

So, I'm doing 2 driveway arches in white PVC.  I wanted Blue LED string lights with white wires in LED ideally.   I want 8x 100 sets per arch since the arch will be around 28 ft in length so each channel is about 3 ft long.
       They don't have that, so I bought blue LED string lights with green wires.  I don't think it'll look as nice with the green wires.  These were $5.94 a box.  

I am doing 8  wood (tripod style) mini tres 4 ft tall, at approx 24-26" dia at the base.    My plan was to put 200 green LED lights on green wires on each.  so 1600.  

         I bought Green incandescent lights on green wires as they didn't have any green string lights.  Luckily they were only $2.44 a box for these.    Hopefully  1600 incandescents wont be an amp load issue on my controller.

I also will have 5 little candycanes.  Bought the ones Lowes has out this year, that are red and white plastic, and are about 45" tall. I was gonna do red lights with white wire.  Don't have those.

        I bought red LEDs on green wire, 100 x 5 packs, that I'm planning to use.   These will be paired up with the 8 mini trees on that controller so that'll reduce some of the overall amp load on that controller.

So, thats what I got.   I did find 3 small boxes of blue leds on white wires, so bought them and if in the next week or two they get a bunch more, I can get ther est.  Otherwise I'll return those 3 probably.

I spoke with a manager, and he said they way al those lights were in their system, he thinks they are leftover from last year.  H also said, they have been told that they will be getting christmas stuff through next June!

So, what are you thinking you have on hand?

 

[Rhizzlebop]

On 10/12/2021 at 9:55 AM, TheSignGuy said:

You might have to improvise with the incan lights for this year. I'm in the upstate and have some extra's NIB I can spare if you are interested. I'll have to go in and look depending on the colors you are after.

I'm gonna post this in a new thread, but thought I'd ask here.  Been playing with my RGB flood kit from LOR.  Got it up running some color fades on an ANIMATION (not musical sequence) for Halloween.

Issue is, when my computer goes to sleep, it stops.  I can come to my computer, and hit the keyboard, and it'll start waking up, and a few seconds later I see the lights pop back on and start their action again before the computer screen even comes back on.

I just bought this CMB24 controller kit, but I did NOT have this issue last year with my regular 16 channel starter kit controller.
I've always had it run from like 6 PM to 10 PM, and it did that no issue daily whether my computer was awake or not.

Any idea what to change?

 

[TheSignGuy]

2 hours ago, Rhizzlebop said:

I'm gonna post this in a new thread, but thought I'd ask here.  Been playing with my RGB flood kit from LOR.  Got it up running some color fades on an ANIMATION (not musical sequence) for Halloween.

Issue is, when my computer goes to sleep, it stops.  I can come to my computer, and hit the keyboard, and it'll start waking up, and a few seconds later I see the lights pop back on and start their action again before the computer screen even comes back on.

I just bought this CMB24 controller kit, but I did NOT have this issue last year with my regular 16 channel starter kit controller.
I've always had it run from like 6 PM to 10 PM, and it did that no issue daily whether my computer was awake or not.

Any idea what to change?

 

 I'm not 100% sure about your issue but my show laptop never goes to sleep. I just have the screen dim down after a certain amount of time, never had an issue. I'm sure it has something to do with the power settings.

[TheDucks]

2 hours ago, Rhizzlebop said:

Hi,  

         I bought Green incandescent lights on green wires as they didn't have any green string lights.  Luckily they were only $2.44 a box for these.    Hopefully  1600 incandescents wont be an amp load issue on my controller.

 

Mini lights have 3-5 Amp fuses in their plugs. Also, the strings packaging Should have a May connect x end to end (remember the first plug handles the full load)

If you do Max (8*3=24, which is 2x the power PLUG rating) out all Channels, you will ALSO need to plug each Bank into another Breaker

💡 split the heaviest loads between BANKS

[TheDucks]

2 hours ago, Rhizzlebop said:

I'm gonna post this in a new thread, but thought I'd ask here.  Been playing with my RGB flood kit from LOR.  Got it up running some color fades on an ANIMATION (not musical sequence) for Halloween.

Issue is, when my computer goes to sleep, it stops.  I can come to my computer, and hit the keyboard, and it'll start waking up, and a few seconds later I see the lights pop back on and start their action again before the computer screen even comes back on.

I just bought this CMB24 controller kit, but I did NOT have this issue last year with my regular 16 channel starter kit controller.
I've always had it run from like 6 PM to 10 PM, and it did that no issue daily whether my computer was awake or not.

Any idea what to change?

 

Go to the Power settings and turn Off sleep and shutdown  (OK to let the Monitor sleep)

 

[Rhizzlebop]

On 10/15/2021 at 10:35 AM, TheDucks said:

Go to the Power settings and turn Off sleep and shutdown  (OK to let the Monitor sleep)

 

So I did  turn off the sleep on the computer, and that worked to keep it running.  However,  now it wont stop running.  I set a schedule to run from 6 PM to 10 PM, and twice in a rown I got up the next morning and its still going.  

I don't know what the heck is going on.  I never had this problem last year.

[TheDucks]

1 hour ago, Rhizzlebop said:

So I did  turn off the sleep on the computer, and that worked to keep it running.  However,  now it wont stop running.  I set a schedule to run from 6 PM to 10 PM, and twice in a rown I got up the next morning and its still going.  

I don't know what the heck is going on.  I never had this problem last year.

What is running? The show or the PC?   LOR Schedules need the PC running . AFAIK LOR does not use Windows Task Scheduler

[tlogan]

When scheduling shows. I've found that it is pretty easy to set the start time at PM and then forget to change the stop time to PM so it's set to run into the next morning. You might want double check the stop time is set to PM as well.

[PhilMassey]

The only thing I can think of is that you may have something in the Schedule. The Schedule Editor can be tricky to delete items from. The easiest way to be sure there are no extra entries in there is to find the files Weeksched.lsc and Yearsched.lsc  in the root of your LOR folder and delete both files. Then re enter your desired schedule in Schedule Editor.

 

[Rhizzlebop]

3 hours ago, TheDucks said:

What is running? The show or the PC?   LOR Schedules need the PC running . AFAIK LOR does not use Windows Task Scheduler

 

3 hours ago, tlogan said:

When scheduling shows. I've found that it is pretty easy to set the start time at PM and then forget to change the stop time to PM so it's set to run into the next morning. You might want double check the stop time is set to PM as well.

 

2 hours ago, PhilMassey said:

The only thing I can think of is that you may have something in the Schedule. The Schedule Editor can be tricky to delete items from. The easiest way to be sure there are no extra entries in there is to find the files Weeksched.lsc and Yearsched.lsc  in the root of your LOR folder and delete both files. Then re enter your desired schedule in Schedule Editor.

 

Gentlemen,  Thank you for responding.

To be clear my computer stays on 24/7.

 

I used show schedule last year no problem.

All I did this year was I made a new show called slow fade for Halloween, and I plugged it in there.  I opened up the calendar looking hourly view and it clearly says 5:30 till 10 PM.  The brownish area is clearly just the 4.5 hours of duration, each day.

 

This mornng, nad yesterday morning, all the floods lights were still flashing away out there like the schedule was still running.

I am just not sure what I'm doing wrong.

 

I goess I can try to create a whole new schedule and new show file just to make sure something isn't hosed up somehow.

[k6ccc]

Using Phil's suggestion of deleting weeksched.lsc and yearsched.lsc just note that you can rename those files to something else so you either don't loose the data, or can easily change schedules simply by renaming a file.  For example, I have a weeksched - Year-round.lsc, a weeksched - MIIP.lsc, and a weeksched - Halloween.lsc (plus a few old ones).  In a week when I switch to my Halloween show, instead of re-creating the entire schedule, I just copy weeksched - Halloween.lsc to weeksched.lsc and I'm done.  Same thing for Christmas.

BTW, all this is done in Windows, not in LOR.

 

[tlogan]

19 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

Using Phil's suggestion of deleting weeksched.lsc and yearsched.lsc just note that you can rename those files to something else so you either don't loose the data, or can easily change schedules simply by renaming a file. 

DANG! Why didn't  I think of that? Will definitely do that in the future.

[Rhizzlebop]

1 hour ago, k6ccc said:

Using Phil's suggestion of deleting weeksched.lsc and yearsched.lsc just note that you can rename those files to something else so you either don't loose the data, or can easily change schedules simply by renaming a file.  For example, I have a weeksched - Year-round.lsc, a weeksched - MIIP.lsc, and a weeksched - Halloween.lsc (plus a few old ones).  In a week when I switch to my Halloween show, instead of re-creating the entire schedule, I just copy weeksched - Halloween.lsc to weeksched.lsc and I'm done.  Same thing for Christmas.

BTW, all this is done in Windows, not in LOR.

 

Ok, I just tried deleting the show schedule, and created a new one, and saved.  We'll see tonight if it shuts off or not.

 

[Rhizzlebop]

So last night it appeared to run correctly.   It was off this mornign as it was supposed to be.   I guess it somehow just didn't detect  the schedule because I had rechecked after the above comments, and it was all set to PM, around 4-5 hours of run time.  

[BWCFWI]

Back to the original topic.

 

I've had real good luck with lights from Menards. Only issue I've had is that the squirrels seem to like the taste of them better than my lights from other vendors.

 

Enchanted Forest® 70-Light Mini Christmas String Light Set at Menards®

[Timothy]

I paid $6.98 for 100 LED strings at Lowes over here in Indiana.