Bad dumb nodes

[kjam22]

I ordered 15 dumb strings from ray and now that I am trying to burn them in I am finding quite a few bad nodes.  I am finding around 5 or 6 nodes per 100 that are bad.  Are others seeing this or do I have a bad lot?

[JonB256]

I ordered some metal square SSstrings. These are the ones with 4 LEDs per square. A few were "wrong" immediately.

On one, 2 of the 4 would not display Green. Red and Blue were fine.
On another, 2 of the 4 wouldn't do Red, just Green and Blue.
If I "massaged" them with power applied, they would occasionally come on properly. Take off the pressure and it stopped working.

I will just cut them out. It will go from 20 squares to 19. When I get a final count of bad squares, I'll let Ray know. Perhaps he'll toss in a extra string on my next order.

[dpitts]

Out of the the different form factors I have bought the squares had greatest failure rate.

[injury]

I had a lot of bad/flaky nodes testing with my SSC V1 with the smart string nodes, then I did the V3 mod and had two more strands to test and either Ray's average jumped greatly on those last strands of 128 or that mod made things not nearly as picky.

 Still had like 2 Nodes that were bad but that was due to wires soldered out past the waterproofing and the connection broke.

[tbone321]

He will replace the bad nodes but it's the shipping that will kill ya.  If you let him know, then he will include them in your next order.

[chrisatpsu]

He's actually been pretty good at times to just send you nodes to replace the bad ones.

[injury]

Does he not include spares with the orders any more? I've only ordered lights from him once, was the end of last year but he had included spares of the string nodes and the rectangles floating around the shipping package.

[kjam22]

I didn't get any spares and I asked for samples of the smart nodes that I did not recieve.  The death toll is rising, I have one string that has 10 bad nodes on it.  At this rate I will be out a whole string of lights after I replace all of the bad nodes.

[davron12]

I'm noticing the same problem. All 8 of my dumb strings that I've tested so far have around 5 bad nodes. With most of them, the red is out, a couple have the blue out. They all went out within the first hour of having them running. I'm so glad I decided to burn them in before I put them out. I'm hoping they're just a few bad nodes and the others won't start having the same problem after running for a few days.

[mitch09]

I ordered 6 strands of 100 and have had a total of 19 bad nodes. About 3/100.

Lots of splicing to do still.

[davron12]

That's about half the rate of mine. I keep trying to convince myself that something doesn't add up. It just doesn't make sense that there's that high of a rate on the dumb strings, when all they are is an led and a few resistors, and there's barely any problems with the smart strings. Out of all 2500 of my smart strings, there's about 2 bad nodes.

I've double checked the voltage, ensuring it's 12v and tried plugged the strings directly into the power but that didn't work. It also seems weird that no one else is complaining besides us few. Is 3-6 bad nodes per 100 normal for the dumb strings?

[frankr]

I am not complaining about mine but I have found variation in color of my dumb strips and some bad nodes in my dumb strings.  The failure rate I saw on the nodes was around 6%

Then again my original smart strings have had massive failures after the first season.  The newer batches are rock solid but the first batch was atrocious...

Frank

[kjam22]

So I burned in all of my nodes and the final failure rate was around 8 percent.  Mostly red failures and they seemed to be concentrated around the beginning of the string.  I told ray about the problem and he sent me another string of nodes to replace the bad ones.

The new nodes appear to be made differently and he indicated that they were of better quality the the original ones.  I hope to get them burned in this weekend so I will report if the failure rate is better.

[davron12]

Yup, same here, mostly red and towards the beginning. I noticed something over the weekend on what causes the red to "burn out". I just received another batch of 8 strings that I ordered and plugged them in for 2 hours directly to 12v. There wasn't a single bad node, so I thought great, these are perfect. After hooking them all up outside, throwing a dsc on them, I immediately had problems. Some of the reds flickered for a couple minutes and then went out. I assume this has something to do with the pwm - those bad reds don't like to be turned on and off a lot.

The moral of the story - make sure you leave your lights flashing when you burn them in. Leaving them on for a couple hours isn't enough.

I don't have time this year to take them down and splice out all the bad nodes, so I'm thinking of covering the bad ones up with black gorrilla tape so they're not visible.

[kjam22]

I am also seeing additional failures.  The count continues to rise on a daily basis.  Still haven't had the opportunity to check out the new strings, but looks like I am going to have a bunch of splicing to do this weekend