I like the fact that, when new, the poundland lights only fill half the box. Makes it far easier to repack them after Christmas, ready for next year without learning the ancient Chinese art of 'cram packing'

Poundland is improving their products just because they know BigClive is watching them. ^^

Is no worries my friend, magnificent Chinese fashionable decorative light adopts new innovating feature saving expense of fuse. Is no need any fuse of any kind, fashionable decorative light itself are fuse 100% on every place. If disaster with faulty electrics or ungainly customer, innovative and high quality wire will be warm and disconnect so no burning down cottage or dwelling and no injure children and pet.

When do we get the video of you shorting out the cheap chinesey set to set it alight (presumably somewhere safe outdoors with a fire extinguisher and dead mans cut-off switch)

I live in the US and it seems that European Christmas lights are made a lot different from the ones we have. I would love to see you do a teardown of American LED Christmas lights and compare them to European ones.

I have a theory about the big boxes for fairy lights, it's to ensure you can put them back in the box at the end of Christmas. 😀

3 strands of copper, or copper-coated aluminium. Either way chances are it's so thin it would act as a fuse instead of catching fire

My son received a shock from some of those nasty cheap lights used to decorate handrail on stairs for a party.. So yeah, lots of kids running their hands up and down them pulled some LEDs off and the pokey out wires were quite nasty.. Plus they were plugged into a power supply with one of those illegal 3-pin plugs with no fuse. Im afraid I had to unplug it and pull the plug off (because yeah, the wire was so crap it just broke) and then I explained to the manager how he should not use them.

A socket on the end? Ooh, handy, I can plug a 3KW electric heater on that end to keep the tree really warm... :P

Who else wants to see Clive short out the Chinese lights and capture it on video! :-)

Thanks for the video Clive. I've been stressed with finals and watching you examine lights is very relaxing.

My favourite bit is watching Big Clive’s thumbnail gradually healing with each video.

“They’re worth it because they are dangerous” Oh Big Clive... this is why we love you

I really enjoy your humor while describing poor or bad products.

"they are worthy getting because they are dangerous". Just one of the many reasons I love this channel.

can you do a bit of destructive testing by plugging a high amperage device into the female connector on the end of the srand

I love the fact that Clive is always so quick to swap the leads in a multimeter back to their "normal" position after measuring current, yet just tosses the ebay set of lights on the floor with the shorting plug still in! It would be interesting to see a high drain appliance (electric heater or kettle perhaps) plugged into the socket at the end of that set, in the name of science, of course.

i really like how you have these little tricks to find the color value of resistors. Very good !

For this year's bigclivedotcom Christmas special, a 3kW fairy light meltdown extravaganza!

Thank you. The safety culture you exude is great. But, you are still fun. Perfect.

Another great video, Clive. And once again you show just how crap and dangerous stuff sold on eBay can be. The scary thing is that 75% of the population will be clueless when it comes to the safety aspect of things like this. I wonder how many kids this Christmas will be messing around with Christmas trees that have these type of lights on them? I reckon this video should be played on all UK tv channels during the run up to Christmas!

My close-by Poundland closed, so now I have to walk over an hour to visit one, but after watching this video Im gonna go get probably two of these sets next Friday, just cause they seem very nice.

7:08 - "There's so many things wrong these...that's what makes them so appealing." Such a great quote. ;)

I should be working on a project, but I'm just sitting here watching a video on a topic I have no clue about. I think I'm addicted to these videos....

You've just reminded me of how fucking terrifying AC voltage is. I touched one of the 'live metal studs' - the sharp solder piercings - on one of these when helping a friend set up lights years ago and had somehow managed to push it out of my mind.

When he was talking about the cheap Chineezy unsafe lights and the dangers to pets, my mind drifted to that one particular scene in "Christmas Vacation" about a cat who decided to dine on Christmas light cords.

I watched a video of Julian Illet's recently, he discovered with the Changzhou Yutai power supplies if you overload them just a smidge, the voltage drops off rather quickly (I believe it was his video on those stake-in-the-ground, project-colored-lights-on-your-house things). I'm quite impressed with the build quality on their power supplies, they had someone that actually cared in their Engineering department.

I have to actually appreciate the major feat of engineering that went into making such gossamer-thin mains leads.

16:50 - LOL, epic sound bite there Big Clive!

Cheers for the heads-up Clive. I've got five 10m sets of those dodgy ebay strings in our (child and pet free) house except mine came with a UK plug fitted with real mains cord between it and the box. The rest of the string is the same though. After watching this I've gone around and changed all the fuses from 13A to 1A and told the wife to only use the low duty-cycle effects. The othe risks I can cope with - I'm not in the habit of chewing cables or pulling on the bulbs. I think I'll replace the lot next year though.

Hey Clive, can you make a short circuit at the Mains cable from the cheap eBay one and Plug it in? I think its interresting to See what happens with these flimsy little kables... Also I Want to See flames!

I have the cheap chinese ones. You can solder a bridge between Collector and Emitter of the two Transistors so it stays on even when another mode is set. (Collector and Emitter are the outer two legs)

Thanks for the video Clive. We can always trust you to show us what too look for in quality and what to look our for in cheap electronics. :-)

That’s very reassuring to see that those low-voltage power supplies are properly designed. I have two of those on some slightly different sets that came from a garden centre (around £15 a set) with 200 LED’s apiece. They’re in the loft above my bedroom on a time-switch running lights out the front of the house.

Inspired by Clive, I started disassembling and analyzing things more often and, ironically enough, I found and disembodied the same chinese fairy lights. We've come full circle

Clive, could you do a teardown/comparision of an RC battery pack which has a fairly high C rating and a standard lithium cell? Would be really interesting to see the constructional differences.

Cheers Clive, i have a couple of set's of the "cheapy " lights which i bought about 5 years ago. I was not impressed with the plug and lack of fuse, but they work well and have done since , both sets are stuffed in (4') clear plastic tubes ( a bit like multi coloured light sabers) hung near the front door and plugged in a dedicated extention with a 3A fuse. They stay cool and as they are xmas use they only come in use 3 weeks of the year. But those PL ones do look good and maybe after xmas i might try and bag a bargan and buy some .

Clive, you can get that adhesive to loosen if you put some drops of gasoline (Petrol) near the seam of the cap...

Hi Clive! Love your videos, keep em coming, gonna watch them, thank you, bye, take care 🤣

On my house I run 15 sets of lights at Christmas all bought from B&M or poundstrecher after watching this I’ve decided to buy the cheap unfused lights because I feel the arcs and sparks coming from them will give a better show then they go

Love the nod to ElectroBOOM... FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!

Hrm, so do I spend $5 on good Poundland tat, or save $1.50 and kill myself? Choices, choices!

If you unplug it, it forgets it's setting... unplugs it and plugs it back in... it's still on the user selected setting.... lol, sods law at work there.

You can also buy similar lights with some special effects. My set did not have soldered joints at the connections from the cables to the control box, instead they horrible were crimped.Someday it decidet to arc betwent the cores of the mains input, melted the wire and finaly got shorted. It had also mutch thicker wires, maybe this was the problem, the crimp connectors are desiged for this thin wires, so not all of the cores from my thick wires where fitted in.

I haven't bought mains powered fairy lights for many years. Australia has ~14 hours of sun per day around Christmas period, so solar fairy lights work very well. A few of mine die around midnight but most are still running at sunrise.

"Ooh pretty. You have candles on your tree this year. How traditional" "thanks.. Wait, what!?"

I used to test power supplies with the ten ohm resistor as a fuse. Putting on a short after the bridge. Many fail the electrical separation test afterwards between 240v and the output.

This video made me glad i finally decided to throw the old micro-incadescent fairy lights with dinky thin wires and switched to LED with the step down transformer

I like how the poundland power supply housing is just a cheap USB plug. Although I'm quite disappointed that you never blew up the eBay ones. Although I bet you could plug the eBay lights into an audio source to flash in line with your festive tunes.

I brought a set of the green cable lights from ebay. They have the same cheap plastic cover power supply as the clear cable set you showed except the cover was well and truly glued shut. The first set I brought would not stay on a fixed mode setting and kept cycling through the options setting and as I have MS and my brain can't cope with flashing lights, I brought a second set with worked for one Christmas. This year when I brought them out the red LED's stopped working.

I love LEDS for tons of things. But for Fairy lights I prefer the old style ones, the CRI is so pleasant. The Technology Connections channel did a nice video on them....

These Christmas lights gonna great yes

I got some lovely lights in flying tiger for £5, they are fairly short i had to get two sets to cover the tree, and they are battery powered 3 AAs but they are cemented into solid plastic cubes and cylinders, coloured purpley pink, dark lilac and light blue, they are the best fairy lights ever. They lookk just as lovely turned off as thry do on

I busted out laughing when you identified those sloppy symbols as "mass-produced LEDs"

I like getting these light strands after the holidays for my projects. it's still the cheapest way to get LED's where I live.

The cheaper Chinese ones are probably made with copper-plate aluminium conductors. Tried to solder a break in something like this ages ago - and found that the "copper" wire was VERY difficult to join, although I was able to bodge the joint after some effort.

I've recently had a christmas led light power supply fail. I opened up the power supply (with much difficulty), and I found that the pins of the transformer were supposed to be held in contact with the windings by the plastic (no solder or anything). What had happened was bits of plastic around the pins broke off (presumable due to the power supply being dropped a few times), so the pins were no longer held in place. Also I noticed pads came off the pcb when I wiggled the transformer. Interestingly enough, although the power supply was of poor quality overall, it did have good separation, which I'm guessing is necessary to meet the local safety requirements (I bought the lights in NZ).

When i was younger i ordered a set of those ''same'' chinese led lights, i didnt notice that they were of the 110v variant. so i plugged them in and they lit up.. and bursted into flames shortly after :D

I used to have one of those Chinese sets, until it nearly set our house on fire. One of the mains wires came off and shorted across the other contacts, causing some spectacular arcing and smoke effects. Not particularly funny when it happens near something flammable. Luckily I could pull the plug before it became a problem. It didn't trip the 16A breaker either, probably because the mains wire had such a high resistance. I think it was copper cladded steel or aluminium or something, not even pure copper wire.

My god there's some dangerous crap on ebay!!! Don't think i'll be buying them some how. Well done Poundland and Clive of course!!!

On the Poundland set.....What is the little block on the cable - between the PSU and the start of the LEDs?

There are nice usb ones, just three wires with surface-mount LEDs with a hot snot over them. I like them a lot

Clive, why don't you try combusting such a set of chinese lights with that shorted plug? Of course only in a safe environment (outdoors, on concrete or so) and with a means of turning off the power remotely, like on a long extension cord? I bet this would be a fun video to watch!

Another fairy light video! I absolutely love them, been comparing a lot of cheap and expensive strings myself. Mainly to find what fairy light string that has the best warm white color. A lot of them are either green-ish or 4000K white, or they're 2200k pink/redish that looks okay, but not perfect. The best one I've found so far is from this Swedish hardware store called Jula, it has a lovely warm color, 180 lights across 18m and every other LED twinkles/flickers randomly and discrete in three brightness settings, ~25%, 75% and 100%. The price of it was $22 and it has a 24VDC switchmode supply without any twinkle controller, so it's always set to twinkle. Good thing about that PSU is that the light doesn't have mains flicker like the others that run on 24VAC. I'd love to have a string like this with static lights too. What's your experience on this, Clive? Is it because of cost issues they mostly keep to the awful colors? I mean, even expensive strings doesn't do well in the color reproduction.

Them poundland lights are not half bad. We got a set on our tree this year and they are actually nicer than the previous sets we have had which cost 4x as much in terms of colour quality and ofc value.

Clive: Forgets the shorted cable connected to the lights and starts fidgeting with the controller. Me: Please don't plug it in, please don't plug it in, please don't plug it in.

_".. And it starts melting and possibly combusting. But it gets worse."_ I'm listening

I thought for sure you were going to forget that shorted plug and plug in that set, don't forget it's there!

I got a set of those £5 Poundland lights, they are nice and the power supply runs super cool

You forgot to mention that your entire house will smell like phthalates the entire month of Xmas. Have around 7 of these but stopped using them and bought proper CE marked ones this year.

Poundland for the win! I'd even trust that power supply that's chewed up if the end was potted with epoxy to seal it.

The DeathDapters often have an annoying fuse in them. If you want to breach even more safety laws they will plug into the narrow type of extension lead (like your white one) upside down - i.e. the earth pin being the only pin in the socket. You have then opened the L+N shutters to allow you to plug in your europlug directly, whilst bypassing the DeathDapter and therefore getting rid of another pesky layer of safety

Plug some significant, like 500W, load into the euro socket on the end. That would give a really good result.

Something exploded? Where’s the video Clive!

I have some of these cheap ebay fairy lights on my house, but I have connected them over a 50VA isolation transformer, so I think that nothing bad can happen.

Great video as always Clive, but I have a question, when you find these dangerous products on sale do you ever report them to the relevant bodies?

I would love to see the Chinese lights on an IR camera. Especially with a short. Maybe you can make a destructive test of those.

I have the same type of christmas lights I bought at a hardware store they are very nice lights very vivid colours, being in Portugal our power supply plug has the European standard plug of course, but they're the same, too bad they don't flash though.

Never thought I'd ever see Poundland and cheap eBay in the same sentence

But what if you're in a country that's doesn't have shops like poundland, and instead charge €30 for the exact same set, simply because people think that's around what a set like that should cost? In other words, which set from ebay would you recommend if that's the only viable option for cheap sets?

"That's because something exploded on it. Excellent!" 😅 Could that thin wire be speaker wire? We did some work on a house and discovered someone had run speaker wire through the wall from the light switch to the ceiling lamp. Yikes! We had to check the wiring throughout the rest of the house.

*The cable is the fuse.* Did you try to plug the mains plug into the daisy-chain socket for perpetual lighting? ;-)

Fairy lights here in Australia too.

Are all UK fairy lights DC? How did the incandescent mini lights work I've seen pics where theirs only one wire. All holiday lights in the US led or incan have at least 3 wires for the ones that connect togeather and the 2 wire string that has no end. We have solar lights that are very similar to the UK lights wire and blub. But our standard mini leds don't seem to be DC they also flicker except for special 2 phase Philips brand. They use the standard A type non polorized plug as the incan sets use. I haven't seen any kind of dc convertor. Could I buy some UK sets online and use a sep up transformer would the 60hz hurt the incan sets. Thanks for the vid mate have a great day.

Items like these occupying only a half of the box is a good thing, because you could never stuff it back as well as specially trained children did at the factories. This way you could re-use the original packaging for storage.

Well done poundland...winner of the fairy light wars...

I have seen another novel use for solar powered fairy lights. I was driving around my home town and happened to pass one of the graveyards and saw alot of fairy lights on the flowers on the graves. And it actually looked nice. Or am I really freaking weird?

(1:04) - "They're actually worth getting just because they're dangerous..." Hello! Hello? HELLO-OH?? SHIT!

I have exact same ones on my tree now, both of them. Resistors on the chinese one become worryingly hot leaving black burnt mark on the sleeve, hope they won't light up my tree... They survived last Christmas, will see how they do this time.

I'm gutted our store don't do the battery operated thin copper wire lights with the tiny leds on them. I have several sets in fancy clear wine bottles and they look great on the mantelpiece.

Very entertaining 😀. Nollaig Chridheil, Mr. Mitchell!

clive you can actually buy the proper adaptor that turns 2 pin to 3 pin & that the 2 pin plug sits inside the 3 pin they also have a fuse too

Talking of dangerous there seems to be a lack of pink and shitty lately lol

Do they make full RGB fairy lights? Like those programmable tapes, but with the added safety/durability of strings/ropes.

As ever wonderful. I'm off to poundland.

Hi Clive. I'm just wondering here, wouldn't there be a case here for using a plug in RCD at the socket, and running all these lights via the RCD, via a fused 'power strip'?

I was hoping you'd short the end of the Ebay lights and plug them in...

Think it would be safer to use a shaver adaptor as the have 3amp fuses in them.

But Clive! The Chineseum lights are both CE and IP44 rated! Therefore they comply with all safety regulations!

I mean, you're almost required to short the ebay ones and plug them in! Come on, man!