bottle tree

I am trying to make what I call a bottle tree. I welded ¼ inch rod to a 2 inch pipe and bent the rod out to form the branches of the tree. I will put wine bottles on the rods to make the tree. I want to put 5 small Christmas lights in each bottle. Is there some way I can rewire a standard set of small bulb lights to do this. I will be using 110 volts to light everything up. Thanks.

 

Yes, you can rewire or do whatever you want. It will be a bit of work since you could be talking a hundred or more bulbs. You will be doing so much rewiring that I don't know how much help a strand of Christmas lights would be except as a cheap source for bulbs and sockets.

 

Using individual low voltage LEDs might be simpler and safer.

 

I have been trying to rewire the lights and yes it is alot of work. I wired the lights in parrell, plug them in and they all burned out. I figured I was putting 110 volts to each light. My problem is I don't know how to wire them.

 

120 volts.

What lights are you using? If they were wired, in a string or otherwise, when you got them, how were they wired?

Pictures might help us see what you're looking at. See How To Include Pictures.

 

If the original string was wired series then all of the lights are need to provide the proper voltage reduction. Try dividing 120 by the number of lights in the string and use a low voltage AC power supply (wall wart) to supply the voltage. Rewire in parallel for each bottle. If they are series and you want to leave them in series then the math gets more complicated. Probably dividing the number of bulbs by five and dividing 120 by that number would give you a staring point.

I don't know how the original string was wired or even the type of Christmas light so the above is just a guess at a starting point to experiment.

 

I'd put some self-piercing or "vampire sockets" on a 2-wire extension cord.

 

Commonly available mini-lamp strings of Christmas lights do not use 120 volt lamps. The lamps are 2.5 volt. A fifty-lamp string is wired in series, which is why the entire string goes out when one lamp fails. A 100-lamp string is actually two 50-lamp strings, with each string wired in series. The two strings are then combined in parallel. That's why there are three wires going to the plug (they share the neutral).

You can extend the wires between lamps to put groups of lamps in the bottles, but the total number of lamps must be 50. (Technically 48 lamps will work -- 48 x 2.5v = 120v -- but any less will shorten the life of the lamps.)

 

I would even consider doing fiber optic. A quick search online turns up many suppliers of the kits and components. The cable could be very small and discrete and you'd have just one power/light source that can be hidden somewhere.