So I started putting up some Christmas lights today, which, all in all, is a relatively simple process for me – we still live in an apartment complex, so about the only place we can effectively decorate is our porch/patio. This evening, I started by wrapping each of the vertical supports for the handrail with rope lights; tomorrow, we will dangle a few nets of lights off those self-same railings, as well as put up some other randomness; and who knows where it goes from there.
This time around, I went out and got one of those ever-so-shiny light timers with a built in photosensitive circuit, designed to turn the lights on when the sun goes down, and turn them off either at sunrise, or 2/4/8 hours later. Makes life easier, so you do not have to worry about turning the lights on and off yourself, right?
Yeah… riiiiight.
I string up the lights, I plug them in, I turn the dial on the nifty little magical box, and given that the sun was already well set by this time, the lights came on just like I would have expected. And then, a few seconds later, they went out. A few seconds later, light… then no light… then light… then no light.
Terrifying space monkeys were loose in my light-sensing-switching gizmo.
Only not quite. Thanks to the plethora of lights I had put up (8 rope light strands, and that is just the beginning), I was literally putting out enough candlepower to cause the photosensitive circuit to trip. Only, since the brain inside this box is a wee bit slow, it would take a few seconds to respond each time the switch got flipped.
And I suddenly had blinking Christmas lights. For eight bucks. Oh, the things we think sound like a good idea at the time…
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