Why I Buy Old Fashioned C6 Christmas Lights with LED Bulbs for Decorating Our House

Kathleen and I have lived in our house in Newtown for almost nine years. When we first moved in, we hadn’t had time to buy outdoor holiday decorations, so we used solutions like the Chelsea Light Flurries Projector to blanket the front of our house in virtual snowflakes.

But in the years that followed, like most other people in our community, we invested in Christmas traditional lights. And the ones I’ve started to purchase recently are long outdoor Christmas light sets that can be strung together in series and connected to a single outdoor power receptacle.

The LED Christmas lights I like best have C6 bulbs, which are the larger bulbs that typically have a raised pattern on the exterior that looks like a checkerboard. I guess this is to look like the bulbs are covered in ice. This pattern is really tough to see from any distance, but the multi-colored strands of C6 bulbs look very nice when hung on the outside of your house.

Most of the sets that are available have bulbs approximately six inches (15 cm) apart on the wire. The 35-foot light sets are typically delivered on a spool, so that they can be put away at the end of the season in a very compact form.

The main reasons to choose LED rather than traditional incandescent bulbs is because LED lights use so much less electricity and do not generate heat. This matters because the bulbs last for years, and multiple 35-foot-long sets can be connected in series to a single 120 volt outdoor power receptacle.

The old incandescent sets were more limited in terms of the number of sets that could be wired together in series and plugged into a single receptacle. This really makes a difference, when you are trying to illuminate a large part of the front of a multi-story house or a long ranch house.