LED Keeper® - LED Holiday Light Set Repair Tool

I honestly think this was a life saver. Anyone reading reviews before purchasing this product has to know that this requires patience at first. Once you get the hang of it, troubleshooting stringed LED light failures will be a breeze. Here is how i used it for my icicle led lights. 1) Plug your light into a socket and identify a section where the lights dont work. 2) Use the clamps to identify the section. 3) Plug the light into the Repair tools socket and pick a random section between the clamps 4) I prefer to use the last led found on the icicle light as it is easy to isolate a single wire to do the testing. 5) Once you position the wire and pull the trigger observe if any lights light up. If it doesnt find another spot to test within the section. 6) If a portion of the LEDs do glow, then you move the clamps closer narrowing the section that doesnt work. Repeat steps 3-5 7) Once you are down to a single icicle and observe 2 or 3 that never lights up, you can bet one of those LEDs need replacing. Ive repaired four 70 inches long in hour replacing around 10 micro LED lights. The first one took a good 20 to 30 minutes.

IT DOES WHAT IT SHOUD

After watching the videos provided by the manufacturer, it took a couple of tries to see how to test the light strings, but in the end it worked and was able to find the bad bulb within about 5 minutes.

There are some things that are predictable karma rules - 1) A flock of Pigeons will gather immediately after you have just detailed your car 2) The wind will blow just after you have raked the fall leaves into a nice pile, and 3) It will rain the day after you finish stringing up the Christmas lights. The first two problems are dealt with through a little more effort, and perhaps some sort of crystal therapy....but the third problem means that at least one or more of your Christmas lights will short out as the water finds its way into the light set. In the old school non-led world of Christmas lights, this was not much of a problem. But since I switched to LED, the problem has gotten much worse, and it seems that every year I wind up replacing several strands of those expensive buggers. So, enter this device which promises to find and fix the trouble LEDs. Yay! I watched the video, it seemed simple enough, so I ordered it, and collected my strands of dead LED lights to finally get some control over the spiraling cost of replacement. Or at least, that was the plan..... So by now, you are probably getting the idea that this is a negative review. It is probably a 3 star product, but I took away an extra star because it also broke my heart...never giving me the satisfaction of salvaging my light strands. Heres why: 1) The directions on the package are pretty useless., there are all sorts of gizmos and do-dads on the device, but the only one that is explained is the little hook thingy that you use to test the wires. 2) The product works by trying to short back to the plug, causing the lights on the string to light up, and then uses ptotato chip bag clips to mark the spot to replace the bulb. But heres the thing, to do the test, you must unravel the twisted strands of the wires leading to EACH AND EVERY bulb, and test it one at a time. It is tedious, and since the device pierces through the strand wires to make contact, a negative reading occurs frequently, even if the bulb is good. What is the fix? CUTTING OUT the bad bulb and attaching a shorting (shunt) bar - which is like a fancy wire nut. You are given 2! I had more than 2 on the first string alone! 3) Testing on a net light, I could never even FIND the problem. Had to call the technical service - who suggested it might be the transformer - and then informed me that it is probably beyond repair. Nice! I could have bought two new strands of lights for the cost of a device that tells me to go buy strands anyway... Each of the 4 net lights I tested (each taking about 30 minutes each to test) had the mysterious transformer problem. Sigh.

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!

Just repaired 8 strings of GE lights that I thought were goners. Some strings had a bad section, some strings only had a short good section. Looked like a nightmare, but wifey said, Lets at least try that tool. Fair enough. Plug a set into an outlet. Mark the start point and end point of the section that wont light. Unplug from wall and plug into the tool. Now, lets say you identified a dark section of 30 lights. Go to the 15th light and squeeze the tester on the wire to that light. In most cases, either lights 1-15 will light, or lights 16 through 30 will light. Lets say lights 1-15 light up. Excellent. Now you KNOW that your naughty LED is hiding among lights 16-30. Time to test again. Where? Split the difference: which in this hypothetical scenario would be around light 23. Squeeze the tester on the wire going into light 23 and... the lights before it or the lights after it will light up! Aha. So your naughty light is hiding among the dark lights... and all you need to do is keep narrowing it down until you hit it. Sometimes you find it quickly, sometimes it takes a little longer. Some of the strings I fixed had 4 or 5 bad lights - which meant doing this process several times, each time on a different section. But I look at it this way: $30 for a tool that just saved me 8x$20=$160 worth of lights. NOTE!! What does a GOOD light look like vs a BAD light? The bad bulb often (not always) has a bad wire on it. To help give you and idea what I mean, take a look at the pictures: One of the wires has burned off of the bad LED. Compare that to the good LED in the other picture: two wires, both intact. Every once in a while (1 out of 15 in my case) you will find a bad LED that looks perfectly good. Fortunately, the tool has a little socket on it so you can test good looking bulbs.

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.

Love this product! Saved me from throwing away my LED Christmas lights strand. I was able to locate the faulty led light bulbs and replace them. Voilà, lights are working again. Highly recommend this if you want to save money from having to buying more light sets!

Got an LED string of lights or icicle lights that decided to quit on you? This tool is great! Do go online and watch the repair videos as the instructions are not great. Once you learn how LED lights work and what makes them go bad, this tool shows you exactly how to diagnose and repair a dead portion of a string or a whole string. Well worth the price as lights are bloody expensive.

worked well in locating issues with LED light string