Shortening standard mini strands?

[bking85295]

In many cases the mini light strands (both incandescent and LED)  are longer than what I need for specific areas.

I'm wondering if you can shorten the length of the light strands (i.e. cut them to the desired lenght, re-splice the wires, etc.), or do they no longer work once you do that?   That way you don't have a bunch of unwanted additional strand length.

Will that work or incandescents?  LEDs?  or both?

Does it make a difference if the strand is the type that doesn't go out if any one bulb goes out vs the type that the whole strand goes out when one bulb is out?

[Jimm]

If you are talking about removing lights then the answer is no or not easily.  You would have to replace the lights with equivalent resistance to keep from burning out the other lamps.
Jim

[JonB256]

With 100 Ct. incandescents, it is easy. Between #50 an #51, it goes from 3 wires to 2 wires, then back to 3 wires.

You can cut at the 2 wire point. Now you have 2 50 ct strings. I had to do this a lot when I put lights on my Pumpkins and Monster Faces because I only had 100 ct strings.

LEDs??   I never cut them. They are different from vendor to vendor.

[dmoore]

For info on how to seperate incandescent strings:

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[Timon]

As its been it's a problem if you want to power them from 120VAC.

What I'm planing is converting AC LED strings to 12VDC strings built to the lengths I need for David's coro products and driving them from the 3 channel DMX controllers. For the 2V LEDs I'm putting 5 in series plus a resistor and for the 3.4V it's 3 plus a resistor. I then put those in parallel. This way I can populate say a pumpkin to the exact number and color LEDs I need.

OMT, doing it this way allows you to use the cheaper half wave strings and they should be as bright or brighter than the full wave ones since they're being powered from a PWM DC controller.


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[JonB256]

which is why I don't throw away my "dead" LED strings because the LEDs are rarely the problem. They can be chopped up into little DC chunks (if you've got the time).

[mms]

I agree with JonB256, you can definitely cut incandecents on the sections with 2 wires.  This also holds for LEDs as well.  The roll of 200 LEDs at Sam's Club is 4 strings of 33 and 2 strings of 34.  You will see some random places with heat shrink.  There's a resistor under that to keep the voltages correct.

The old school C9s are wired in parallel and you can cut to whatever length you want.

Good luck!