LED Keeper® - LED Holiday Light Set Repair Tool

It used to be that if you had a string of Christmas lights, either they all lit up or none lit. Then a few gyrations later, there are sets that, at most, every other bulb would go out. Then we made the move to LED Christmas lights. Not even half way through the first season, small sections of the string - about 10 bulbs or so - would go out, but the rest of the string was fine. By the end of the season, all the LED sets had these burnt-out sections, some sets had more than one section out. Second season of LEDs, we bought all new light sets and, within a week of being on the house, those sets have the same small section problem. Needless to say, these LEDs are getting expensive fast and making me wonder if going back to the tried-and-true incandescent lights wouldnt be better. Fortunately, a friend mentioned this little light-fixing gadget to us, but the one he had was only for incandescent lights, not LEDs. My wife and I searched all the local stores and couldnt find it the LED one, but Amazon came to the rescue. Im not sure why we kept last years bad LED light sets, but we did and Im glad we did. Less than 10 minutes after opening this gizmo, all of last years bad sets are good as new! The directions for this LED Keeper are easy to follow and the device is simple to use - and a real money-saver. The way it works is you plug the light set into this battery-powered tool and then follow the directions to figure out which bulb (or bulbs) is (are) at fault. The problem is the cord isnt all that long, so you need an extension to test light sets that are already in place on the house. Nonetheless, its a great tool! If you use LED Christmas lights, do yourself a favor and pick up one of these. Youll be glad you did.

Just repaired 8 strings of GE lights that I thought were goners. Some strings had a bad section, some strings only had a short good section. Looked like a nightmare, but wifey said, Lets at least try that tool. Fair enough. Plug a set into an outlet. Mark the start point and end point of the section that wont light. Unplug from wall and plug into the tool. Now, lets say you identified a dark section of 30 lights. Go to the 15th light and squeeze the tester on the wire to that light. In most cases, either lights 1-15 will light, or lights 16 through 30 will light. Lets say lights 1-15 light up. Excellent. Now you KNOW that your naughty LED is hiding among lights 16-30. Time to test again. Where? Split the difference: which in this hypothetical scenario would be around light 23. Squeeze the tester on the wire going into light 23 and... the lights before it or the lights after it will light up! Aha. So your naughty light is hiding among the dark lights... and all you need to do is keep narrowing it down until you hit it. Sometimes you find it quickly, sometimes it takes a little longer. Some of the strings I fixed had 4 or 5 bad lights - which meant doing this process several times, each time on a different section. But I look at it this way: $30 for a tool that just saved me 8x$20=$160 worth of lights. NOTE!! What does a GOOD light look like vs a BAD light? The bad bulb often (not always) has a bad wire on it. To help give you and idea what I mean, take a look at the pictures: One of the wires has burned off of the bad LED. Compare that to the good LED in the other picture: two wires, both intact. Every once in a while (1 out of 15 in my case) you will find a bad LED that looks perfectly good. Fortunately, the tool has a little socket on it so you can test good looking bulbs.

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I was going bonkers last weekend because of the 11 light strands we use during Christmas, 6 of them had a section out. I googled fixing Christmas lights and thankfully this product came up. I watched one of the videos the company has and decided to give this a try. There certainly is a bit of a learning curve (watch the videos!), but I was able to fix four of the strands tonight until I ran out of replacement bulbs (a fifth one randomly started working again). I accidentally tore the entire housing off of the first strand because the bulb was stuck, so put one of the pods on and it lit right up! I went to our backyard, which has a different kind of lights, and I had to fix at least three bulbs, which took a while. But the strand eventually worked again! On these strands, the wires were wound very tightly, so it was hard to fit the keeper in sometimes, but I was able to unwind the wires after pulling on them a bit. Thankfully, I found the bulb on the fourth strand very quickly, probably also because I had some good practice under my belt at this time. I saved about $100 in new Christmas lights by getting the LED Keeper!

I have the other light keeper and it has saved me money so i figured I would give this a shot. I saved 3 out of 5 strands. And maybe couldve saved them all but I ran out of replacement bulbs. Please give this a try(it does require some patience) I doubt you will be dissappointed. minus one star because 9v was do a

Great little device to save time and money instead of buying lights every year when a half of the string dies and you cant figure out which bulb is bad. There is a learning curve if you follow the instructions. But once you get the hang of it you can go through a string of bulbs in a matter of minutes and find your bad one. Brought back to life six strings of lights that I knew were bad. It has the function to test the lightbulb, fuse and the string of wires. Good investment instead of having to run out and replace your lights.

Extremely disappointed in this product. Theres so much about its design and function that it makes no sense. Its to the point Im confused about all the positive reviews. Ill go down a list of what is wrong with the thing: - the instructions are terrible. I had to find the official video guide online to figure out how to use it - a string of lights must be plugged into the device meaning the lights will be lit by a 9 volt battery. The battery just didnt provide enough juice to light up the LEDs well enough to tell if the light is bad or dim (because its so dim it doesnt appear to light up) - if the strings wires are twisted pretty tightly (like theyre supposed to) its difficult to slip the wire into the testing hook. and this is the biggest ????? of them all: - the LED keeper cuts through the wires insulation to make a complete electrical circuit which is a stupid and inconvenient method of detecting bad lights. Ultimately what this is going to do is kill the string of lights faster by allowing the copper wire to be exposed to the elements, especially if the string the LED keeper is used to fix is going to be used outside. The LED keeper wasnt able to help me find any bad lights at all. Seriously, youre better off buying a contactless voltage detector and watching a youtube video tell you how to use one to detect bad lights on a string of Christmas lights. Its much cheaper and faster than the LED keeper. To make matters worse, what Amazon shipped me was either used or returned and definitely not new.

The LED Keeper has already saved me over $100 above the cost of the tool. I easily repaired 8 light strings that would have cost $17 each to replace and I still have more to fix. I bought the least expensive one I could find at about $25.

Found and fixed the broken led bulb within seconds. Must have product if your buying LED lights.

As we slowly switch our home Christmas lighting to LED strings, some LED based strings, after only a couple of seasons have stopped working. Sure, they are relatively cheap sets, but I thought they would last longer than a couple of seasons. Right now LED strings are more expensive then filament bulb strings, so repairing them makes sense. The LED Keeper worked great. I was able to quickly identify the failed LEDs, and fixed three out of three strings, with multiple failures in each string, in about 90 minutes. In all cases, because the strings are relatively new, the cause was a broken lead at the point where the LED leads are bent around the socket. Probably jammed in quickly by automated machines which overly stressed the pin. I am a little apprehensive about the insulation piercing mechanism the Keeper uses, but so far it is effective and reliable, and is just a pin prick. Whether it will lead to premature wire failure remains to be seen. An issue only peripherally related to the Keeper is finding replacement LEDs. Big Box stores sell packs of five, but when you figure the price, you realize you are better off getting a cheap LED string on sale and use it for replacing bulbs in other strings. If the socket type is the same all the better, if not, just be careful about not stressing the pins when you unbend and re-bend them when switching sockets.