LED Keeper® - LED Holiday Light Set Repair Tool

I bought 3 180 bulb LED lights from Sams 3 years ago and after year 1 started to have all sorts of problems with them. They were expensive and really nice looking when working so I didnt want to trash them. This LED tester seemed worth a shot. A bit on the expensive side but well worth it in the end. Im a BSEE working in computers so technology almost always comes easy to me. I read a few lines from the enclosed instructions and within an hour or so I found 11 bad bulbs and fixed all three strands of 180 now working lights (I only had 13 spares so whew) anyway the lights look great and Im a very happy customer. The testing can be a bit tedious especially when locating multiple bad bulbs that knock out a large amount of lights. I was able to find half the bulbs easily (often they are the 1st or last in a strand that is out) and on the difficult ones it took some time but sure beats randomly pulling one out at a time to see if its the one... I attached a pick of the lights (wrapped around the palms. Thanks!

This thing is such a time saver. I have not been happy about a product as I am about this one. My kid is now second best in this house. Great product

I was HIGHLY skeptical about this tool when I bought it, but it does exactly what they say it does and how it is shown in the videos on their website [...] I learned a few things about how it works that might help others use it more effectively. Many of the complaints I read indicate that nothing happened when they squeezed the trigger; others said it was necessary to hold the trigger for a moment. Theyre correct, and heres why. When its working, you can hear a high-pitched whine like many voltage-boosting circuits (think about the whine when you turn on a big camera flash unit), and it ramps up over a few seconds until the lights come on (if they do). As far as I can tell, it starts at a low voltage to avoid burning out working LED bulbs. If not enough current is flowing it starts ramping up the voltage. When the circuitry detects that the current flow indicates the LEDs are illuminating, it stops increasing the voltage. This makes perfect sense as a design. If youre on LED #2, itll light almost instantly. But if youre testing halfway down a 200-bulb string, its going to take a few seconds before it reaches the proper voltage. Overall it is a brilliant design, but it can confuse the user if youre impatient. So be a little patient while you work. Also, its easy to THINK you have the wire positioned properly in the test slot. Sometimes it took several tries to get right. Be careful to seat the wire correctly before you squeeze, then as I noted above be prepared to wait several seconds if youre not close to the yellow plug end of the string. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 for a few design compromises and challenges. It wasnt quite so happy with a 200-bulb string that had a transformer block halfway down. It was very hard to understand what it was doing, and the results were strangely inconsistent. On those multi-segment strings, it might light the left half or the right half, or sometimes parts of both. So the process of finding a failed bulb became much harder than a simple binary search (look it up). It does work, but not as simply as with a shorter string. Also, this tool doesnt instantly fix LED strings with more than one failed bulb. You still have to work until you find all the failures. So this tool will be great to immediately fix a failed string when youre pretty sure only one bulb failed. But if its an older string with several failed bulbs, prepare to spend some time. I really like the bulb testing slot. I would be happier if it supplied alternating current; as it is, you must try both orientations as only one will illuminate the bulb. But it was still fairly easy to use. I would be a bit happier with a longer cord; I had to use an extension cord at one point when the string was already mounted on a wireframe. Not a big deal, and it was fine for sitting on the living room floor testing an unmounted string. All in all, this is a valuable tool I can heartily recommend despite its minor faults. I think tonights single string repair paid for half the tools cost, and it will have completely paid for itself the next time I use it.

I go all out with Christmas decorating. My husband knows to leave the house when I’m decorating, as nothing pushes my buttons worse than lights that don’t work! I went to put my outdoor lights up a few weeks ago, and EVERY strand had a least 1 section that wouldn’t light. At $25 a strand, I decided to try the LED keeper and see if by any chance I could repair them. This morning, in less than 20 minutes, I have easily repaired 4 strands of lights! It’s easy to use, works great, and reduces my blood pressure!!!

I had my led light strand fixed in an about 10 minutes. Read the instructions which are folded inside the purple/yellow cardboard inserted in the package. It’s not intuitive, but once you read the instructions, it will all make sense.

Couldnt get to work at first, and almost threw it in the trash due to frustration. The video tutorial was helpful, but could get no lights to light up at all, on a working or non working strand. Decided to change the 9V battery, even though the red indicator light turned on when I squeezed the trigger. So CHANGE THE BATTERY before you get mad and throw it away. Was fairly easy to work after that. Although still required some effort because I found I had multiple bulbs out and a bad socket on a single section of strand.

A single strand of lights on our Balsam Hill prelit LED tree wouldn’t light when we setup our tree. The tree was purchased in Jan 2021. Using this keeper, we identified the bulb that needed replaced and had the full tree lit in 10 minutes. The clips were so useful!

Driving to my moms and I see a LED snowman sitting on the side of the road with a FREE sign hanging from it. Why not! Get it home thinking I could use my mini light keeper. Nope I needed this one. Since I had success with the mini light, I ordered this one. Took a bit of time to figure it out the process but using the pods, I was able to restore it and it look great! I ordered more pods in case the need ever arises. Highly recommend these repair tools.

I really hate dealing with Christmas lights that dont work. I have thrown out many a string just to save myself the headache of trying to find the problem. This year I had a segment of an LED net light that stopped working after it was on a bush in front of the house. I decided to try this product to see if I could find the issue. I tried it first on a regular string of LED lights that I pulled a bulb out of and followed the instructions and it worked just as advertised. I figured the net lights would be a bit more complicated given the grid and all. It was. The trick for the net lights was figuring out the wiring pattern. It was basically just a zig-zag line. Once I figured that out, it was nothing to find the offending light. Once I found it, I tried trading it out for a light that I knew worked and...that did the trick...the previously bad segment worked and the previously good segment stopped working (because I put a bad bulb in it). I replaced the bulb and it works fine now. Since the net light was on the bush when I was doing all of this, I had to use an extension chord between the product and the plug on the lights. The addition of the extension chord did not hinder its use at all. All in all, it took me about 15 minutes to find the problem. But now that I know how the net lights work, I think the next time would take a small fraction of that.

So this thing half worked, thats why I am giving it 2 stars. Cons- I will start with the cons. I had 10 sets of net lights that had sections that didnt work. I plugged in the unit and tried the gun part to find the section that didnt work. Well, it didnt work, anywhere, at all. I tried it on multiple parts that worked and didnt work, and I got nothing. I wasnt sure if I was doing it wrong, so I watched YouTube videos, yup I was doing it right. I also tried a strand of LEDs (not net lights) that were all working and nope, still didnt work. So that was a HUGE letdown. Pros- Even though the gun didnt work, I was happy the little tool at the end to remove the lights worked great. The light tester part also worked great too. Tips- Of the 10 light sets that had sections missing, I marked those areas and removed all the non working lights one by one, and I found the bad lights and was able to replace them. When using net lights, all 10 sets had the bad bulb on the unlit strand on the left or the right. For example, if you have 4 sections missing, the bad light was either in the row on the left or on the right. While taking out each light and testing it was NOT what I had in mind, this tool somewhat helped check the bad bulbs. Would I spend $25 again for this, absolutely not. However if you have a bunch of time to waste like I did, this did eventually get the job done. Good luck!!!