In this video I show you how I altered the characteristics of a single traditional string of Christmas tree lights to allow all of my Star Trek Hallmark ornaments to be powered. Starting in 1991, and until 2005, Hallmark released Star Trek (and other) ornaments that were powered by removing a bulb from a “standard” Christmas tree light string (typically 50 bulbs per circuit, but also 20 bulbs per circuit), and plugging the ornament into the place where the bulb had been removed. The recommendation was not to replace any more than 2 or 3 bulbs with ornaments, likely because the ornaments consume more energy than a bulb, so the voltage to the ornaments would become too low. In this video, I show you how I replaced some lights with short circuits in order to keep the voltage high enough to power more than the recommended number of ornaments. This might not be the best way, the way you’d do it, the safest way, etc, it happens to be the way I did it, and it happened to work. There are other ways to power these old ornaments, but no other way that I found that was as inexpensive; I didn’t spend a dime. The video is boring and long. Sorry about that. The most important concepts are up-front, so you can bail if you don’t care to see the demonstration of the end product. One thing to note, if you plan to embark on a project like this, is that the Klingon ship is not the same as the others with respect to how it affects the other ornaments on the string. Rather than figure that out, I simply put the Klingons on the separate circuit (each 100 bulb string has two circuits). So 14 ornaments are on one 50 socket circuit and 1 is on the other 50 socket circuit. Live long and prosper! -sengsationa1
Hallmark Star Trek Ornaments 