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The Energy Efficient Holiday Light Spectacular: Components
The majority of the display consists of LED C6 "strawberry"
bulbs from Creative Displays. To date, these are the best quality LED lights that I have come across that still have
standard electrical plugs. As far as LED lights go, these are remarkably good.
They're totally sealed (preventing corrosion
and accidental electrical shocks and GFCI trips), and
they've got a full wave reflector that removes the flickering and makes the bulbs even brighter. I whole-heartedly recommend these. Major downside? They are only sold for bulk decoration in packages of twelve.
The icicle lights (which make up for a great deal of the brightness of the display) were Philips LED icicle lights, available at Target. These 'naked' LED bulbs are focused so where they paint light on nearby surfaces, and the individual lights occasionally shine as you walk by them. Not as good as the Creative Displays lights, but they are the only readily available brand of LEDs offered in an icicle formation.
NOTE: I do not recommend purchasing the Philips brand lights. My Philips lights have a
60hz flicker, poor color consistency, and... no warranty at all! My few pre-existing lights from 2005 are rusting from the inside out due to corrosion and will likely not last very much longer. Sometimes cutting edge is bleeding edge.
The NOMA LED Teardrop lights from Ace Hardware were purchased before I had a comprehensive strategy on which manufacturer's lights I was going to light my display. These smaller bulbs are pretty good, actually.
They've got a nice appearance and a solid brightness to them. Individual sets
weren't too expensive, but the price per bulb ended up being high. At $.20 per bulb, they were a little on the expensive side for an otherwise ordinary LED light. These small strings are used as a chaser sequence to form the word "SNOW" in the display.
The projector gives the illusion of falling snow by shining a very bright and focused spotlight onto a disco ball that
has been turned on its side. White beams of light are reflected all over the house, and because the disco ball is turning,
the lights move down the house as the ball turns. It makes for a really nice effect, even if you don't really look like
true snowflakes.
On average, these two 40 watt projectors consume one third to one half of the electricity that the whole display uses for lighting!
An old fashion kind of Christmas light controller used mechanical electromagnetic relays to control the high voltage
lines. These days, solid state relays (actually, TRIACs) are used
which offer extremely fast response times, and also allow for high
voltage circuits to be dimmed.
Branched off of the single electrical plug-in are 64 unique electrical circuits. All of which can be turned off and on, dimmed, faded, and flashed. 16 of the circuits are used for the row of red trees in front. Another 16 are used for the blue and white lights in eight evergreen trees on the sides of the driveway. The remaining 32 circuits are used on the house, the "Let it Snow" sign, and the star.
LEDs allow more to be done with fewer circuits. When using LEDs, single circuit can handle something as large as an entire roof outline, without getting overloaded.
Really, it is a fine product. 5" two-way speaker. Up to 100 watts of power. Not great on the bass response, but then again, I just wanted some soft sound pumped into the front... not a rock concert. (Please pardon the pun.) This big chunk of fiberglass does the job just fine.
The Belkin Tunecast II was originally designed to allow the iPod and other portable music players to be used inside of
a car, and heard over the car radio. When placed in a car, its limited range of just a few feet was just enough to be received by the car's radio. But the signal would not travel much further.
Part of the Belkin's weak signal is due to the power design of the transmitter, but part of it was because it has
the wrong length of antenna wire attached. You can
compute the proper length of an antenna for broadcasting at a particular frequency. By soldering a new antenna of
the correct length onto the board, I increased its transmitting power. After the modification, the Belkin Tunecast II
can be picked up by a car radio for two or three hundred feet.
Why not broadcast for a few miles instead of a few hundred feet? If a transmitter is too powerful, it could attract the
attention of the Federal Communications Commission. Part 15 of the FCC rules allows for
very low power FM transmitters, if they meet certain guidelines.
Christmasdisplays.net has instructions on how to modify the Belkin Tunecast II to increase its range. Determine what frequency you are going to transmit on, and use this calculator to find the correct antenna length (at half wavelength).
If you add in the length of the copper cords in the Christmas light strings themselves, it easily adds up to over a
mile in electrical wiring.
The primary power distribution backbone for the display consists of 125 feet of 12 gauge wire. The
larger wire was used to minimize electrical waste over the length of the cable, and to reduce
voltage drop at the far end of the backbone. (Voltage drop = dimmer bulbs.) The remaining cable runs were all 16 gauge
wire to help reduce costs.
This machine stores all the music. It contains the routines that all of the lights dance to. All the smarts are in this
box. Just a serial connection out (to the light boxes) and an audio connection out (to the FM transmitter and speaker) and it is ready to go. To save energy, I run it without a monitor, and connect to it over the network.
As it turns out, after I had purchased most of the components for my display, Light-O-Rama came out with a new product: a
director card with MP3 player. This little gadget would have
taken, perhaps, only a few watts of power, and provided all the functionality that I was getting for a general purpose PC running at 100 watts of power.
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