LED Keeper® - LED Holiday Light Set Repair Tool

I had two outdoor reindeer that had partial LED light strands out. I monkeyed around with a voltage tester, voltameter and randomly swapping out lights to try and find the culprit for hours - to no avail. I bought this in hopes of salvaging the reindeer or not having to rerun new light strands. After 15 mins, I found the 3 dead bulbs and the reindeer are as good as new. Save yourself the trouble and just buy this tool. Specifically for pre-lit trees/decorations, the probes on a voltameter are almost impossible to insert and get lined up on both sides of the terminal with such little room, the voltage tester is too sensitive to get an accurate reading with the way they wrap the strands and you continually get false readings, and swaps are only good if you only have 1 bad light. If youre curious how it works, this tool injects very small probes in through the insulator and completes the circuit at a specific spot in the line, by-passing half of the strand. With process of elimination you will find your bad bulb/bulbs in no time.

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!!!

wow this thing is awesome and so is the company. i bought a string of 200 led christmas tree lights 3 years ago - they cost about $25 at the time. they worked great for 2 seasons then this being the third i plugged it in and about 30 bulbs in the middle of the string were dead. i did a google search on how to repair LED x-mas lights and found this - watched the video on how to use it on the manufacturers site and then ordered from amazon. followed the instructions (the video is great), found the bad bulb, used one of the pods (my mine does not have removable bulbs) fixed the string in about 20 minutes. i also ordered extra pods and i am glad i did because i now i can fix this same string in the future. might get a few more years out of this one string of cheap chinese LED lights - and think about how many strings of LED lights you could go through in a lifetime if you didnt have this tool to keep them working. the company is saving thouands if not millions of strings of lights from ending up in our landfills. pretty impressive. one last thing - i was slightly confused at first when i opened it and started the video - i called the 800 number at 6pm on a weeknight (December 8th) and a super friendly man answered fast like he was just sitting in his livingroom taking calls - he clued me in quick and i went back to the video and successfully fixed my lights. buy it. a tool every home should have if youre using LED christmas lights.

Makes finding the problem spot so much easier.

Very easy to use and even finds multiple failures in one section. The only problem is after a few years outside, hanging in loops that sway in the wind, I get a lot of failures! The leads corrode and break with the wind. When I purchase a new string, I may squirt weatherproof electrical sealant into the sockets. I also bought a pack of 500 3mm LEDs. I can swap out the bad bulb and put a new one into the plug part. Just remember, the long lead goes towards the end with the little latch tab. It wont work the other way.

So this tool helped me repair 3 long LED sets that were completely out. It would have cost me about $75 to replace the sets so I decided to try this tool instead. With it, I was able to find and replace many bad LEDs in the sets so that they worked again. It took me about an hour per set. In the end, I ended up replacing 15 bulbs total. Heres the BIG BUT if youre thinking of buying this. Do you have plenty of LEDs lying around to replace the bad ones? This does not include replacement bulbs. Remember that LEDs are NOT universal. Every set seems to use a different shaped base on its bulbs. I used an x-acto Knife to reshape the bases of the LEDs I had lying around to fit in different sets. On 2 of my other sets, I gave up because the bases were badly corroded. This kit includes 2 replacements for corroded bases so after that what are you going to do? Also, in my case, even though I got the sets working, what happens when they fail again? Im out of bulbs and once they are on the house, Im not taking them back down to troubleshoot in the winter. The bulbs are all the same age so it stands to reason that there will be plenty more failing soon. After this season, I will be buying new sets on clearance. So the decision is yours. How old are your sets? Do you have the patience to troubleshoot? Do you have lots of spare bulbs? Are you sure its just a bulb issue and not corroded sockets? The tool works. Start halfway up the set and work your way down the line. It lights up what works and easily tests individual bulbs once you remove them. It comes with a 9V battery installed and ready to go. If you have lots of bulbs out, test one at a time using the tool crimping the wire until you start finding bad ones (start at the end closest to the plug. Good luck!

I have the other light keeper and it has saved me money so i figured I would give this a shot. I saved 3 out of 5 strands. And maybe couldve saved them all but I ran out of replacement bulbs. Please give this a try(it does require some patience) I doubt you will be dissappointed. minus one star because 9v was do a

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.

Not as easy to use as the red Light Keeper (for incandescent light strings), but if you follow the directions carefully, it does resurrect most of your defunct LED strings. I had seven or eight strings that didnt work at all, or only half the lights worked (you know what I mean). At first, try after try, I simply could not get it to work, so back to the instructions -- and VWAHLAH!!! Theres a note to keep your hands well away from the part of the string you are testing, because your hands can provide enough conductivity to give faint, intermittent beeps...and you just cant find the bad bulb. Of course, its natural for you to want to hold the string exactly in the wrong place, so you get very frustrated with inconsistent, intermittent, faint beeping. When I finally learned to keep my ham hands at least six inches away from where I was testing, suddenly the thing worked perfectly. I did have one string where I just could not find the fault...I think there may have been several bad bulbs or a broken wire. But all the rest are now working. Where the problem isnt a bad bulb, but a bad socket, you can cut out the faulty socket, and they give you a couple of pods you can use to jump the wires across the gap. SECRET: two pods dont last long. Theyll gladly sell you more for about $2 a pod. Forget it. Use cheap screw-on wire nuts. The ones I had were a little to big to screw down tight, so I inserted a piece of toothpick into the hole in the nut, and it tightened them just dandy.

I bought a bunch of Noma lights a couple years back and when I checked them this year, I found about 5 strings were only half lit. This product was super easy to narrow down which light was bad and I just popped a replacement bulb in. Very happy I tried this product.