Ulta Lit Light Keeper PRO 01201 The Complete Tool for Fixing Miniature Light Sets

I had many strings to sort out and, IF you follow the instructions, it WILL help you get your lights fixed. It's not straightforward and you will probably fry a few lights along the way. Plan to cannibalize one light string to get your other strings up and running. You go through a lot of lights with this tool using their method of frying lights to fail-close the circuit but there is no better way. I like incandescent lights and this keeps me rockin them.

Most of the lights were out on my ~30 year old prelit 10' Christmas tree.There had been MANY efforts over the years to restore the dead lights to working but there wasn't ANY progress.THIS YEAR I decided to get the tree completely working again.IMO, the LightKeeper Pro beeper function would be terrific on a string of lights, stretched out, but it didn't have any utility for me on the prelit tree, so I sequentially removed, inspected, tested and replaced bulbs, one by one.Virtually all of the problems were caused by a broken bulb wire.The LightKeeper Pro has a metal plate in the nose that worked very well to dislodge bulbs for removal. Frequently I would be able to get those detached bulbs to be secure in that nose pocket when removing from the tree.The method I used was to put a colored twist tie on each dead branch at the trunk once I started testing the bulbs on that branch. My tree had light strings that spanned 2½ to 5 branches, depending upon the height / size. The colored twist ties REALLY helped decrease the confusion in the process.Once a bulb was removed from the tree socket I would pinch the bulb with one hand and the base with the other hand. Then I would LIGHTLY rotate those parts SLIGHTLY back and forth. Then I would use my magnifying glass to visually inspect the leads on the base sides.If one lead was missing, then I would replace the bulb. If either lead was too short to lay on the flat surface, then I would replace the bulb.THEN I would test the bulb in the powered LightKeeper Pro socket for normal brightness. Infrequently a bulb was VERY dim and it would be replaced. Sometimes a bulb was black from the internal fuse blowing and it would be replaced. Sometimes a bulb was dead and it would be replaced.If the bulb inspected and tested good, Then it was reseated tightly into it's socket.The tree consumed about 300 bulbs to attain complete functionality.This LightKeeper Pro tool is recommended.

This worked, in almost every case, to immediately fix a string of 100 incandescent mini-lights where one or more 50-light portions would not light up. Its handy bulb tester was great, and the bulb-puller also quite useful. The audible voltage indicator worked for *some* strings of lights to find a suspect bulb, but would not ID failing bulbs or bad sockets or wires in every case. (It seemed to have the hardest time with tightly wound 3-wire sets, constantly providing the rapid detection tones at every bulb even if that section would not work.)There are numerous helpful videos available to show how the LightKeeper Pro operates, and indeed it does work just as shown. The instructions are clear, and the tool is safe to operate if you follow those instructions.For the price, this is still a lovely little tool, and if you still have numerous and various strings of mini incandescent lights as we do, and you struggle annually to identify the bad bulbs, as I do, and you swear a lot when trying to figure out why some strings no longer light up, as I do, it is more than worth the cost. True, it might not fix every string. And yes, you *can* buy multiple sets of new lights for less than the cost of the Lightkeeper pro, and save time. But if you don't want to throw things away, and you refuse to let a string of lights beat you (especially as a retired electrical engineer!), and you want that neat feeling of having fixed something, then this is indeed the tool for you.