Broken Christmas Lights

When you put up thousands of Christmas Lights and then allow folks on the Internet to turn them on & off a zillion times, you are going to have some light burn out and other things break. In addition to lots of lights themselves, several fuses in the inflatables go bad, and I always lose a number of X10 control modules. Remember that most people turn their Christmas Lights on at Dusk, and then off a few hours later ... whereas it is not unusual for there to be thousands of cyles per day for my setup - yikes!

X10 Appliance and Lamp Modules hold up pretty well ... but these are only rated to 300 Watts, so I can't demand much power from them. The main load is carried by the X10 Super Sockets (since they can take a full 1800 Watts) and one of those will go bad about once/week during the holiday season. The failure is pretty obvious as it no longer responds to commands. Also, there is a mechanical relay inside of these that makes a single "click" when toggled - when they break, there are about a dozen clicks in quick succession - sounds like a buzzing noise. No way to take these apart, so I just replace with another one.

Broken Christmas Lights

Broken Christmas Lights from 2006 with three X10 Super Sockets