Flashing Christmas Lights Fix

[rockychristmas]

Hi All,

I am looking at starting a animated display this year, last Christmas I bought quite a few strings of lights for cheap from Bunnings, and I am just trying to work out how I am going to get it all to work. They all run on 31v, so I was planning on buying a central power supply, putting SSRs out in the yard, cutting the plugs off the leads and going from there. The only drama is that these lights all have one of the multi function controllers as the wall socket and after I cut a plug off and hooked it up to a power supply, one way only half the leds turn on and by reversing polarity the other half turn on. I was just wondering if any of you guys had experience controlling lights like this, I don't really want to have to swap every second led's polarity

Any info would be awesome thanks

 

[kel]

 

[Superman]

You Got it in one Rocky.
From what I have heard about the Bunnings lights that's exactly how they work, Alternate flash by reverse Polarity.

 

[fasteddy]

Welcome to ACL. I dont have any of these lights but from what i can understand is that they have LEDs connected in the string with alternating polarity which is how they get the on/off chase effect. If this is how they are then this is what i would do if I wanted to use these with a controller.

The fact that LEDs only conduct electricity in one direction makes them ideal for use with DC volts, but with these strings because the string is wired in a way where LEDs are connected in reverse polarity to get the flashing effect then the only real way i can see to make good use of these is to run them with 24v AC, this will cause a high frequency flicker as the LED turns off every time the frequency changes duirection at 50hz, so by using AC volts instead of DC volts you then will be able to use the whole string