OT: Christmas lights

The voltage (ie. 2.5V or 3.5V). If you have 50 2.5V lights in series, that is 125V power across the ends. Close enough to 120V (or 118V or whatever you really get out of the wall).

The small lights are designed with shunts to fuse shut if the light bulb burns out so the rest of the string will work at least part of the time. If there's a short somewhere, they could all shunt short together all at once, blowing all the bulbs.

? They are designed to be ultra-cheap and disposible so you buy more next year. They fit their design criteria pretty well, don't you think?

They also have to be safe. If your pet squirrel that year chews through a set of parallel wired lights and shorts them out, it'll probably blow the home's fuse on that circuit. Home owners don't like that, they'd rather (relatively speaking) have only one strand go out. Too bad the squirrels don't fry though.

(snip)

Shoot if you must.

The series Xmas string wasn't invented by the Chinese who make that LED trash you described. While growing up I battled each Xmas season with two series incandescent strings that were made in the mid-1940's (mother still uses them). Having to find the bad bulb(s) every year was how I learned to use my father's Simpson 269. It piqued my interest in electricity, which later spurred me into electronics, which culminated in two electrical engineering degrees. In my own case anyway, something good came from series light strings.

This is what I've suspected, but there's never anything on the strings saying which to use for replacements.

The decoration in question was/is a star for the top of a tree. The star has only 7 or so lamps so I guess something of the order of 18V lamps are needed.

Unfortunately, yes. But maintainability is horrible.

We don't have squirrels but we've had a roadrunner that liked to leave his mark on the lights.