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Quick, simple question.
Is there a trick to finding the blown bulb on a string of christmas/fairy lights?
My kids are now at an age where christmas is exciting and I must say this is the first christmas in a few years where I feel excited too. However, this means they are also getting excited about seeing all the lights and decos.
I've put up one waterfall style (not very long but still a lot of bulbs) and a long string of fairly lights. Both style have lights not working. I was working my why through each indivisual bulb when I thought about asking the seabreeze brain trust.
Thanks in advance 
You need to ask yourself what your time is worth...
Low Voltage lights are cheap and effective... Heaps of options.
There are great sets that run on 2xAA batteries... Pretty sure you can burn your house down with these either...
Look here Christmas Scrooge... Head to Big Dub, fork out 16 bucks and get some multi coloured fairies and stop farting around. Or go all out and spend a hunge and get yourself a good set up to impress the kids
Does anyone know if you can get the equivalent of the old incandescent coloured outdoor light bulb strings - all the newer 12V, tree hugging, friends of jesus, bullsh1t solar lights do my head in too.
Fork out for a set that have been wired in parallel, the ones you have are a series circuit and you will need to go thru and manually test each one to find the blown bulb.... downer!
It's good therapy. Christmas just wouldn't be the same without the annual light repairs. Make yourself comfortable and let the bulb swapping begin! 
Don't just start at one end and work through. Use the "dichotomic divide and conquer search algorithm."
(I was thinking of the old binary search, but Wikipeadia redirected me to that most brilliant term)
Could you make up a wire pair with a connection at each end to plug into the bulb sockets. With that you could quickly isolate the blown bulb.
Just set my tree up. Just 22 bulbs from 176 not working. Only 1 beers worth.
UPDATE
Fixed in only 10 minutes. (Two bulbs blown in series just to keep my on my toes.)
Now, these were working when I took them down last year, which raises the great Christmas light mystery......
How do bulbs 'blow' when they are sitting in a cupboard doing nothing all year???
yeah I have a feeling a have a few out in the same series as well. The major pain I have is I already set them up woven in and out and around posts beams and anything else in the way, before I turned them on to realise half weren't working. After a xmas party last night I wasn't much in the mood to give it a fair go today.
Will probably be easier to take them all down to test them..
Harrow, mine were brand new still wrapped in the box, but they were two years old.
Had 2 long sets, both with at least 20 not working....
Missus came home with a set of LED ones from red dot for 10 bucks...
Bonus ! No more blown bulbs :)
You can do a binary search with a multimeter, but you need to know how the set is wired up, and as there are lots of different configurations it's easier just to test each bulb with your multimeter until you find the dead one.
You can also buy a heap of replacement bulbs and just replace the lot... but it's probably cheaper just to replace them all with a chinese LED set that never blow.
Make sure you unplug the mains plug before doing anything like this.
