All I want for Christmas

My wife and I love to put up Christmas lights (of course, being an amateur astronomer means that this puts me in a state of war with myself!). We've done so every year for the past 6, kicking them off on the first Sunday in Advent and keeping them going through to Epiphany, since the Christmas season only starts on Christmas Day, not finishes! But I digress...

I have an enormous complaint about commercially-produced Christmas lights. They are badly under-engineered, and break at the first available opportunity, which usually means the second year you try to use them. In some respects, this is not terribly different to other consumer electronics which seem designed to die that way (and the conspiracy theorists will tell you that this is done deliberately to make you buy more product). As a professional electronics engineer, I have to say that this offends me quite a lot.

The worst thing is that virtually all the lights you buy now have LEDs. Don't get me wrong, this is a great move since it means that we can run our lights off a lot less electricity, and you get much more vibrant colours which really look grand.

The problem is that they are marketed as "long lasting" so you think "Great, I don't have to check globes every year and they'll last a long time" - that is, until you find the real Achilles' heel of these confounded things: the connectors! On most sets that we own, the LEDs are inserted into the holders that they used to use for the older incandescent fairy lights and they still use the same plug on the wiring harness. It's cheap; the parts are readily available and the harnesses can still be made in the same way. The problem is that the contacts now become rusty because of the different metal type used in LED legs compared to that in the incandescent ones, so you now can suffer from metal-metal corrosion.

In the end, the LED sets only last about as long in practice as the incandescent ones, but then turn around and have a much higher embodied energy (the energy to make them, mainly the LEDs) - oh and are more expensive still.

All in all, we just aren't getting our money's worth.