Tips for repairing Chinese New Year garlands

Although the price of garlands is low, sometimes there are situations when you have to repair it. And there are not so many opportunities. Next, we will talk about simple repair methods. chinese new year garland.

Tips for operating and repairing the usual excess quantity are given on the back of the beautiful packaging box. The process of replacing bulbs is described in great detail, although there are no spare ones in the kit. There are many safety warnings, instructions for using the garland.

One of the wonderful properties of such garlands is that they lay on a shelf until the next New Year, most often they do not want to light up, and they have to be repaired. How to do this will help to tell Figure 1.

All the malfunctions of such garlands are reduced to three types: wire breakage, loss of contact in the cartridges, lamp burnout. After the garland was crushed, shook, felt all the cartridges, swore obscene words and did not achieve results, it is necessary to take the matter seriously.

To facilitate the procedure, the garland should be laid out on the floor, literally, as shown in Figure 1, and instrumental measurements should be made. But before you gently pull the wires, it suddenly flies out of the cartridge, try to tighten up the light bulbs a little.

This is best done when the garland is on, but do not get too carried away, the bulbs do not crush. Otherwise, you can just get an electric shock! The method is unsafe, but quite effective and efficient.

Figure 1. An example of repairing a New Year's garland

If these actions did not help, and the garland did not light up, then you will have to go to instrumental measurements. First "Ring" with a multimeter upper and lower (as in the picture) halves of the garland. The half that turns out to be defective to “ring” several more times, while each time reducing the length of the measured section exactly by half. This will greatly reduce the number of attempts. Such is the magical power of the number two.

To check how magical it is, try bending a notebook sheet or A4 sheet twice in size. You can even bend an entire newspaper, it still will not work, because two to the tenth power is 1024! That is how many layers should be obtained in a folded sheet of paper. Therefore, you can even argue with anyone who wishes about this “intellectual” exercise on New Year's Eve. Anyway, the victory will be yours. If you do not believe me, try it now!

But, before “ringing” the entire garland with a multimeter, you should make sure that the wires are not broken off right near the outlet from the power plug. This is a fairly common defect, and not only in garlands, but in almost all forks, especially with a single termination.

After the faulty "half" is found, it remains to check the bulbs and soldering in the lampholders. From time and high temperature, the solders simply oxidize or break off the wires, but they are quite thin, and here, please, repair.

It happens that it fails itself microcontroller New Year's garland, it’s clear that there’s nothing to replace it with. It happens that the weekend explodes thyristorsleaving black soot stains on the circuit board.

Thyristors can be changed, fortunately, they are sold on radio markets and in online stores. The issue price is 13 rubles apiece. And this is at the price of a new garland 38 rubles! Although, in fairness, it should be noted that there are similar garlands much more expensive. So all repair options come down to finding dangling wires, as described above.

Garland repair probe

Testing with a multimeter is undoubtedly good, but poking probes through the insulation of wires is a thankless task.Specially created probes will help speed up the troubleshooting process. A diagram of one of them is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Schematic of a probe for repairing garlands

Working with a probe is very simple. You need to start with the garland wire that is included in the phase. In this case, if an electric field acts on the antenna WA1, a high-pitched sound is heard from the speaker BF1. When the antenna passes the break and goes to the side of the neutral wire, the squeak in the speaker stops.

Here, as they say, options are possible. If you start with the neutral wire, then after a break in the garland, a phase wire will fall under the antenna, and naturally, sound will appear. As a BF1 speaker, a DEM-4M capsule or a similar one with a coil resistance of 100 ... 200Ω is used. Similar capsules are used in telephones.

See also: How to use a multimeter

Boris Aladyshkin