Layouts and layout building

As is our norm, we put up Christmas Lights on Thanksgiving weekend. MANY miniature lights fail and the typical new and used failures go in the garbage. Looking at the FULL 30 gallon trash bag, I say to myself "This has to be good for something"

After playing with the strands a bit, I find out they are not short pieces between the lights as I thought they were.

Lo and behold, there are 10, 20, 30 foot runs of good stranded wire in that spaghetti!  Somebody in your neighborhood is throwing away these DEAD strands this weekend. Get the word out and you will have WIRE FOR LIFE!

Unraveling is slow, use a tin snips and cut all the bulbs off at their base and the bad wire falls off leaving the good stuff.           doc steve 

pjjkg:

Unraveling is slow, use a tin snips and cut all the bulbs off at their base and the bad wire falls off leaving the good stuff. 

You mean you're throwing away those bulbs?  90% of them are still good.  The trouble with series wiring is that when one goes out, they all go out.

 Yeah, Christmas lights make up 90% of my structure lighting.

Another good option is to sacrifice a few bulbs for the benefit of cheap lighting for your buildings. Cut the right way, you can put two or more bulbs into a building. However, a resistor is need because the wattage on a standard power pack is too high.

Where and how do you put the resistor?

 You can put the resistor inline on either wire going to the bulbs.

No resistor is needed for regular christmas mini light bulbs. They are needed for LED's though. Voltage is "pushed" by the powerpack Amps are "drawn" by the appliance (light bulb) Amps x voltage is what makes watts (sometimes refered to as current). The watt rating on the power pack is what determines the load that you can apply to the power pack. If I recall correctly, these minilight bulbs usually draw 1/4 watt @120 volts.

Dan

 If the power supply puts out 12 volts and the lamp is 3 volts then you either run 4 lamps (5 would make the bulbs last longer) in series or put in a resistor to knock the voltage down to 3 volts.

Several yeas ago I chopped up an old light set into shorter 4-bulb strings, installed a flashing bulb as the first one in the string, used only red and yellow bulbs, and stuffed them into an Internal Revenue Service office building on fire on our HO scale club layout in such a manner that you can see the "flames" flickering but don't see the actual bulbs because they are behind interior walls..

A motorized smoke generator from Micro-Mark that visitors can activate by holding in a push button, and several fire trucks with flashng lights surrounding the scene is a popular one with open house visitors.

The lights are powered from the 5V output of a computer power supply so no resistors were necessary.

As pike-62 says, you don't need a resistor for the normal mini lights.

I just cut up a bunch of 5 light strands and they work great hooked to accessory output of transformer.

As most of my layout is on hollow wood doors, I plan to cut half inch on lower side and about .2 inch on upper to  slide bulb into.

Questions:

1.Should I be concerned with heat generated by bulb?

2.If I run my 5 strand to several buildings, a few bulbs may be left under layout. Can/should I do something else with those sockets?

3.How many strands can I hook up on ATLAS Connectors? Can more than one strand be on one of the three sites on Connector?  How many Connectors can you lash together?

4. If bulb is too bright, can I put a drop of something on bulb to cover part of it?

You guys are great for us newbies. Thanks