How Do LED String Lights Work?

As the era progresses from traditional to modern, people's preferences also change according to the modern age.

People are switching from traditional incandescent bulbs to more energy-efficient LED bulbs, especially around the holidays. We have added a section to our popular holiday light explainer to help you understand LED holiday string lights and how to fix them so you can better understand them. I want to recommend that you read the whole article because LEDs and incandescent lights have something in common.

How do LED String Lights work?

The chimney hangs our stockings with care, and we have lights strung up in our cubicles to make them look pretty for Christmas. LED string lights are very complicated, and I wanted to learn how they work while I was thinking about the lights. Here is what I found about the lights that I will describe in the later section of the article.

First of all, we will learn about the flow of electricity with LED string lights. Electricity moves through a closed circuit and passes over a filament in a simple circuit, like one found in an incandescent light bulb. This causes the filament to glow brightly. People who have more electricity run through them will get hotter and brighter and burn out faster if they have many filaments. A light bulb will not work if no electricity goes over the filament. The filament will melt or blow out if the current is too high. As a result, the circuit will be broken. This means that the light will not work.

However, we would want more than one light to shine on our Christmas tree or along the rooftops of our residences. The two most common methods for connecting several light bulbs to the same power source are to connect the bulbs in series or parallel, depending on your needs.

Difference between Parallel and Series Lights

It takes electricity from the power source to one light, then to the next light, and so on until it gets back to the source. In this case, if a filament in any one bulb blows out, it opens up a gap in the wiring, making the lights not work. Circuits that aren't complete or open stop electricity from going through any of the wires, which means that all of the lights go out.

When lights are connected in parallel, each light has its own power source. It does not matter if one filament dies because each light is still in a circuit with the power source. In the next section, we will discuss differences.

Engineers decided that the best way to connect many strings of lights was to combine them in a row. In other words, there are both series and parallel lights on Christmas trees. Check out this:

There should be no effect on the other bulbs because they are parallel to the defective series. This way, if one bulb is loose, it should not affect the other bulbs because they are in the same line as the loose bulb. This is why some of your lights might not work at all, but others will still work. When more lights are added to the end of a string, these lights are added in the same way.

A bulb can go out by itself, but what about when there are a lot of them? When one bulb in a series went out, the whole thing went out. This used to be the case. Check each bulb one at a time to find out which is blown. If many bulbs were blown out, this would not be easy.

How do Shunts and Fuses Save the Day?

It is any device that lets electricity keep going through a circuit by making a new path with less resistance than the original path. Shunts are small wires that are wrapped around the filament of incandescent holiday lights. These wires help the lights work better. A substance makes them an insulator when they first come out of the factory. Electricity cannot pass across the shunt while there is still a filament in it. The coating makes the shunt have a higher resistance than the filament at first, so the electrical current does not cross it to find a path that is not as hard as the filament itself.

However, when the filament dies out because of heat, a substance that guards the shunt will melt. This will show a lower-resistance wire that's below. In this case, the shunt has changed from an insulator to a conductor, which means that current can flow through it. This keeps the circuit closed and the lights on. Check it out down below.

I recently tripped on a wire while I was putting up lights, and the lights went out. So I didn't know what had happened. The string of lights was still plugged in, so I didn't know what had happened. I took the string out and put it back in. Then I thought of it. There is a blown fuse. For there to be a short in the wire, I must have jolted the wire.

Shunts are used to fix a broken circuit, and fuses protect against damage caused by a short circuit or a sudden surge in current. If you have a short circuit, you have no electricity. A short circuit is caused when electricity finds an unplanned path with less resistance. As long as there is a steady voltage, there will be a spike in current, which can cause many more problems, some of which are minor and some of which are more serious, such as more incandescent bulbs will burn out a fire risk or system overheating.

Many electrical appliances have important safety features that most people don't even know about. At the end of a Christmas light strand, there is a fuse. This is called "the male end," and I'm not making this up. Normally, the fuse can be found through a small plastic door in the plug. This door can be opened and closed to change the fuse.

As the amount of electricity in a wire increases, the wire will get hot, which can melt it or even start a fire. Sacrificial devices were put in place to stop this from happening. When the current goes above a safe level, instead of melting the wire or setting your Christmas tree on fire, the fuse safely opens the circuit, preventing many bad things from happening.

A fusible link is usually a small piece of wire that can be replaced. It is rated for a certain amount of current. It's easier for a fuse to blow than for the rest of the wiring. This means that the overcurrent won't be able to get to other parts of the light strand. When a fuse blows, the rest of the circuit isn't complete, and the rest of the circuit can't get any electricity.

What do you think about my new LED String Lights?

Light strands with LED bulbs are becoming more and more popular for the holiday season. They're more durable, last longer, and use 70% less energy than traditional incandescent light strands. LEDs only cost $0.27 to light a 6-foot tree for 12 hours a day for 40 days. It costs $10 to use incandescent lights. Also, they are a lot less likely to burn out or break than their predecessors, which were made of incandescent bulbs. Why does this happen?

Incandescent lights are easy to understand because a heated filament glows like an ember in a fire. On the other hand, LED lights have a lot more complicated mechanics. You need to know a little about particle physics to understand it, but I'll give you the short version: If you put two semiconductor materials next to each other, called "p-n junctions," they form what is called a diode. One of the materials has a positive charge (p), and the other has a negative charge (n) (n). When electricity is put into a system, electrons move from the negative side to the positive side of the system. On the positive side, particles called "electron holes" move to the other side. A small amount of energy is released when an electron and an electron hole come together. This energy is released as a photon. The visible light we see in an LED is because of this.

LEDs are wired in series parallel like the bulbs we talked about above. LED lights, on the other hand, don't usually use shunts. When an incandescent light bulb doesn't work, the filament isn't there, which causes an open circuit. This means that the resistance is too high for the current to pass through. When an LED doesn't work, it usually shorts out, making a path with less resistance. LEDs don't need to have a shunt because this takes the place of one.

Conclusion

To sum up this article, we have found that there is a small amount of energy released when an electron and an electron-hole meet. LEDs produce visible light as a result of this process. Series-parallel wiring is used for LEDs in the same way that it is for the more traditional light bulbs we discussed earlier. LEDs, in contrast to incandescent lights, do not often use shunts.

LED string lights work with copper cabling and a sequence of LED bulbs connected to them. LED string lights are normally inexpensive and come in a variety of colors. As we know, copper wire is commonly used; it is easy to bend the lights around objects to create lovely products.

References

10 things you should know about LED Christmas lights. (2021, December 17). Family Handyman. https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/led-christmas-lights/

How do holiday lights work? (n.d.). Energy.gov. https://www.energy.gov/articles/how-do-holiday-lights-work

Should I switch to LED Christmas lights? (2007, November 12). The Spruce. https://www.thespruce.com/is-switching-to-led-christmas-lights-worth-the-investment-1387898