I put up xmas lights in the eaves. Most of them were Watson’s Blue Blinkies. I also put up some of those pigeonsnest.co.uk flashers that I built years ago. I think some of them have been flashing for a year on the same cell, so long that I figured it was a lot cheaper to just solder the supply leads directly to the AA cell.
I got a couple dozen AA alkaline cells from Fry’s at a deep discount, and they should last at least a year. I can probably put them away after the season and use ’em again if they don’t leak and go bad. I’m hanging them from the rafters, behind the fascia board, so they won’t get rained on. I didn’t realize how many of these I would need – there are a lot of eaves! I need some more for the garage. I’m thinking of putting some of the PSO fading LEDs there. But they won’t run long off batteries. I was thinking of putting a solar panel out to charge a bank of 2600 Farad ultracapacitors, which should last most of the dark hours.
I went to Home Depot in search of the Philips L Prize LED lights. I came away emptyhanded but I did get some other stuff, including some cheap LED xmas light strings. Now I have to modify them to make them go on and off so there will be less power consumption. More on this soon.
Update early December – I ordered another batch of 3 MiniBoards from ExpressPCB, with each board laid out with five of the Blue Blinky boards. I got them, sawed them apart, and stuffed them with the parts and soldered them up. I used various colors of LEDs, and fired them up. On these I added the red LED as the light sensing diode, so all of them will shut down during the daylight hours. I outfitted them with the batteries and wires, and hung them from under the eaves, each one hung from a small nail in each of the boards. They’re back a few inches so the rain doesn’t get them wet. Tonight, Dec 19 and tomorrow morning the temp outside is supposed to fall into the high 30’s, so it will be a good test to see if these hold up in the cold. That may not seem to be very cold to some folks, but for So. Calif, it’s about as cold as it gets. It seldom freezes here, and only occasionally gets below the high 40’s during the winter. Hey, it’s a temperate climate with a temperature that is kept quite stable by the Pacific Ocean when the wind is from offshore. But tonight it’s going to be BRRRR!