LED Keeper® - LED Holiday Light Set Repair Tool

Did not use had no LED light but keep anyway may is use in the future

I have been putting up outside Christmas Lights for nearly 50 years. I was always frustrated with the testers for incandescent light strings as they were not accurate or reliable. I finally switched to LEDs 3 or 4 years ago. Knowing I would still have issues with string lighting, I purchased the Keeper along with my first LED string of lights. The LED Keeper has proven to be a Life saver. I wrap my lights in balls of 900 bulbs each. When I get them out of storage, I plug them in and can quickly see what balls need attention. I unroll to the bad section and the keep quickly finds the bad bulb. With the cost of LEDs still pretty steep, this testers has Saved me a Bunch.

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 going bonkers last weekend because of the 11 light strands we use during Christmas, 6 of them had a section out. I googled fixing Christmas lights and thankfully this product came up. I watched one of the videos the company has and decided to give this a try. There certainly is a bit of a learning curve (watch the videos!), but I was able to fix four of the strands tonight until I ran out of replacement bulbs (a fifth one randomly started working again). I accidentally tore the entire housing off of the first strand because the bulb was stuck, so put one of the pods on and it lit right up! I went to our backyard, which has a different kind of lights, and I had to fix at least three bulbs, which took a while. But the strand eventually worked again! On these strands, the wires were wound very tightly, so it was hard to fit the keeper in sometimes, but I was able to unwind the wires after pulling on them a bit. Thankfully, I found the bulb on the fourth strand very quickly, probably also because I had some good practice under my belt at this time. I saved about $100 in new Christmas lights by getting the LED Keeper!

Sliced Bread has nothing on this thing. Best thing EVER. If you use LED Christmas (or other holiday) lights, they WILL go bad, and you WILL spend hours and/or money fixing or replacing them. Unless you buy this thing. Ill just give you the punch line first: Those repairs that normally take 20 to 30 minutes to find/repair --- you can do them in about 2 minutes with this thing. (If youve done this before, you probably dont believe that it can be done this quickly, but its true! I have one of those crazy light-shows: hundreds of strands of lights, almost all of them LED, timed to music. As you may know, the bulbs start to corrode/rust/fail after a year or so of use. Most consumer grade strands dont have a stay-lit feature when a single bulb burns out, and even the ones that do, dont always work as expected. When a bulb burns out (or more likely, the leads have rusted or corroded) half of the strand goes out, and you have to pull out every bulb until you can find it, often snapping off the leads to other bulbs in the process. If youve got more than one failed light, youll probably never fix the strand. I normally have 5 to 10 failed strands per year, replacing them costs about $10 per strand; fixing them takes about a half hour per strand, unless I get really lucky. Ive fixed about 8 to be repaired strands from years past and 5 strands that I was going to replace this year, in less time than it would normally take to repair one strand. You can read the instructions for the thing, or watch the online videos, but here it is in a nutshell: First you plug the strand in to an outlet to see what half (if any is lighting) you use a little marker clip to remind you which light was the last working light. Next you plug the strand into the outlet on the tool, and you use the tool to hold and pierce the light cord about half way down the burned out part of the strand. The half that doesnt light up has the bad bulb or bulbs, you mark the spot and keep finding the bad half usually in about 3 to 5 checks, youve isolated the bulb, and can replace it, and youre done. After youve done it the first time, youll be fixing them in under two minutes. The tool even has little, easy to use sockets to test the lights individually, and to test the tiny fuses that the lights come with. It also comes with a couple of easy to use jumpers in case there is a problem with the wire or socket where the light is showing failed. (Not a common problem...) I wish the little cord were a bit longer to make it easier to fix lights that are in the deployed position without having to take them down, but a decent extension cord actually does the trick. Its so fast and easy, youll enjoy it... This is a MUST HAVE if you maintain LED Christmas Lights!

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.

The tool is well designed. It makes repairing led Christmas lights fun and easy. I’m glad I kept a old set of lights that I had with a bad circuit board for the spare LED’s. I replaced a bunch of them.

I hate hate hate Xmas lights. I hate that when one bulb goes out, you have to spend ages finding the bad one. This amazing simple tool cut that process down to 20 minutes. I had to check 5 strings of 100 lights. I found bad 8 bulbs and 1 torn wire. This set had the pod replacements for the torn wire. Such a life saver. 10/10 HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

It’s amazing tool! I liked the way in which ULTA engineers have designed their bad LED searching feature. Dividing the string into the segments and then powering the selected segment from the tool instead of the AC outlet - is a brilliant idea! Before this purchase, I tried to find the broken LEDs manually, but there were too many of them. But it took me only about an hour to test and fix the entire string with ULTA tool. I found 12 bad diodes out of 300 in my string. The major problem with my LEDs were the resistors, connected to them. Unlike the LEDs themselves, resistors wires have been made from the bad metal which got corroded. I liked the individual LED and fuse testing features, found them ergonomic and convenient. I am very happy with my purchase, it is a money well spent.

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.