SECRETS of the Christmas Light Industry - It's all About the Connections - Males/Females/Inline

This may look like a random mess, but this is absolutely purposeful to teach you how to make connections. Hello and welcome back to Lawn & Light. Today we have a special guest and a special instructional video. I know, don't tune out when I say instructional, but this is all about the connection of the Christmas lights. If you watched the last video, the expert level video, we're gonna take you back through that process of how all the lines are connected. So super interesting stuff. It's stuff that we really haven't covered in depth yet. How to put on the males and females, how to connect them, how to do it in line, and a total job to scale right here in our shop, taking you from zero to hero. Memphis, this is my son Memphis. He's, how old are you Memphis? I'm 11. He's gonna join us today and walk through this process. He's never done this before. So if we can teach an 11 year old how to do this, then we can teach you. A dog's never too old to learn new tricks. Is that how that goes? I have no idea. If you haven't ordered your light set, you can order those in custom kits from our website, lawnandlight.com. Our first video teaches you how to measure your home and how to know what you need to order to get your home looking like a professional did it. You'll have all your neighbors asking you, who'd you hire to do your house? And what will they say? Me! Yeah, they'll say, hey, I did it. And I can teach you how to do it. So here we go, let's get started. All right, welcome to the shop. And we have drawn out with painter's tape, the exact is 100% to scale. I'm kidding. It probably isn't even close, but at least it looks similar. The house that we did in the last video, the expert level house. So what we're gonna do here is make all the connections, but we have a helper who's gonna ask questions. Mr. Memphis is with us. Round of applause. What's your job? To ask questions and you will not be the only one learning. So the first thing that you wanna do at your house and in this example is find where your power is coming from. So when you find where your power is coming from, then you're gonna take your lamp wire to connect to power. Take the end of your wire and split it without cutting into the wires. Make sure you don't do that. We've got a decent little split there. I'll roll it back so you can see. Because inside of here, you can see in the middle down there, it's going to split the wires so that they don't have a chance to touch. So then you feed it down in two, and this works for the male and the female plugs. You feed it down in there and you fold it over. Then you take your, this is called a vampire plug. Then you take your back and the side with the tab on it goes on the side that the wire's coming out. So you're gonna slide that on and then press it till it's all the way closed. Now, if you can't get that with your hand, you can always take a pair of channel locks and close it like that. We're gonna put the female end on before we plug this in. Now, you can plug it in and then put the female on, but if you touch the end of it, it's gonna shock you. So it slides in that backside. Yeah, push it all the way down and then fold it over. Now, push that down as hard as you can. You're probably going to need the channel locks. So we're gonna go ahead and plug this into power. Will you plug that into power over there, please? What materials were you need for this job and where can you find them? A hardware store. These are just some cutters. Those are called channel locks. There's one other thing that I really like to have, work pouch. You can put your bulbs, your clips, your tools in here. As you're on the roof, you're not gonna have enough room to carry these things with you in your pocket. You could, but it's a lot of stuff to put in your pocket. Now, as far as your Christmas light materials go, you're gonna need to, before you order with us, if you go to Lawn & Light, the ordering process is on there, but before you order with us, you'll need to know how many what? What's this called? That's a male. And? A male. You'll need to know how many of those that you'll need. You'll also need to know how much lamp cord that you need. And then you'll need to know how many bulbs and clips and wire that you need. This is a house. This is the ridge line coming all the way across. Gutters are running down here. So in order to understand what we're talking about, we're gonna only say two terms, trim and ridges. Trim is basically where gutters are or where the shingles end on the bottom. Ridges are everything on top. Memphis, why don't you give them an indication of where line one's gonna go? Number one, from here all the way around. We're gonna take our line, just like we would on a regular house and lay it out on one. And I'm gonna leave a little bit of slack here to show you guys some stuff. So we're gonna go ahead. We would lay this out and cut this, okay? Again, this is where we'd be starting from. So we're gonna take this side here, cut our little pass at the end of it for our vampire plug. Is this gonna be a male or a female, Memphis? That's going to be a male. We're gonna take our male. Which means this should be a female. Put it on here. Make sure that that slides all the way down in there so that it separates the end of those. Put the back plate on. Make sure that that's fully closed. And we'll wait to plug it in until we get a female on that side. Make sure you get right in the middle of where the cutters are. There you go. I'm gonna be careful not to cut through to the wire when you're cutting the end of those wires. Push down real hard. Pull back. And then your back plate. You take your tab and you put the one side with the tab on the back. And then you can take your... You can take your channel locks or your hands, if they're strong enough, and close that. We have power. Bam. But when I'm starting this ridge right here, I'm gonna put this bulb 15 inches. This spacing is 15 inches, okay? So I'm gonna put this bulb 15 inches from the corner because when we finish our gutter out from the other side coming to here, my last bulb is going to be on this corner right here. But the way it's done is you're gonna actually count your bulbs going up or pull your line all the way up to this top corner and place a bulb on that peak. And then work your way back down using a little bit of slack, if necessary, to make this bulb be 15 inches from this corner. Same thing up here. We're pulling all the way across. If we need to use a little bit of slack to get a bulb on this corner, we're gonna do the same thing. And then this one as well, because we're coming back on the gutter line here, we want this bulb to be 15 inches from this corner. In order for it to look professional, you want the spacing to be spaced out consistently across your whole job. Line two is from here all the way down to here, a number two. How are we going to connect line two? Because this is something we hadn't done before. We're gonna make an inline female, okay? All you have to do is pop that little cutout out. Okay, now we're gonna put it in line. We're going to take this line right here, lay this in, and as you're doing this, another tip is you're polarized the bigger plug, you're polarized on male and female are gonna be on your line with the white writing on it. That keeps everything consistent. So remember the bigger side of the plug, male and female, find where the vampire poker is on that side, find where the vampire poker is on that side and put your line that has the writing on it on that side. So there we go. We've got that lined up correctly. And then you're gonna slide your back plate on from the tab needs to go on the side that you didn't break out for the inline female. These plugs are made in a way where they kind of have to work that way. Okay, now you got an inline female. So another thing you want to check your bulbs. This one was flickering as you're putting them up so that you don't get all the way through a job and have to go back up and tighten four or five bulbs. Usually if a bulb's not working correctly, it's usually because it's just not tightened. Always remember female has the power. What does that even mean? Female, I mean, for me, I just know females always don't have to be plugged into something or not be plugged in. Something has to be plugged into them. That female is carrying the power. Yeah, so that you can actually plug in. Now here's another good tip. So we would plug in there, come around here and then down to the corner here. Again, make sure your spacing there and here is consistent. Do not plug this in before you get this cut. If we cut that right, if we plug this in right now and cut this, it'll short everything out. Now, if you've looked at the job plan, what Memphis is doing right now, putting a female right there, nothing else is going to tie into that. But you wanna end with a female so it's just capped off. Line three comes from here all the way over to here. How do we connect this right here? We are gonna need a female. Inline, it's called an inline female. So he's taking the tab out. See which one's the bigger plug? That's the polarized side. And then we're gonna put it on the wire with the white riding. You wanna make sure that this inline goes in right at the place that you'll need it at this peak right here. So we'll take line three. We're gonna cut it off even here, split it at the end, push it down in there good, and put a back plate on it. Now we're gonna run that one and cut it. Memphis is gonna work on that. And the next one we're gonna get into is line four. While he's working on that, I'll go ahead and get an inline female ready to move from or to connect from line three to line four. If you're doing this at night, good headlamp. Make sure that wire's flat when you're putting it in there and you're pushing it down good. Now we're gonna do line four. We would actually have a bulb right here at this peak, and then we would put an inline either on this side or this side real close. Four. Talk to me about spacing. Why is that important? Yeah. Consistent. Consistency, that's right. You want consistency to make it look professional. Four's gonna run from here down into this corner. We actually are gonna tie line six into line four right here. Memphis is picking this up real quick. Once you kind of have it down, it's pretty easy to learn. It's easier if you can plan your job out before you do it, if you've never done it before. Now, once you have done five or 10 houses, you can start just throwing the lights up and have the plan in your head. As long as your helpers know what the plan is, you need to communicate that with them. For our dormers, we're just gonna put one bulb on each dormer just to kind of give you the idea of what we're doing. So we're gonna go ahead and cut those. If you measure your dormers and you know how many bulbs are going on them, you can pre-cut. I normally don't just to make sure that you have enough. So why don't you go ahead and put a male and female on both those ends there? And right now it doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't. Because the cool thing about these clips is you can just spin them. So if you put a male on one side and a female on the other, you can always just spin it around if you need to move it because you can spin the clips. All right, this is the number five. These are the dormers. We have dormer, let's say dormer one. Dormer two, Memphis made these up for us. Oh, and the male's on that side. And dormer three. There's several ways you can get power to a dormer. Just go with the closest way. So right now on this job, the closest feed to a dormer is here. Sometimes we have to go from the top of the roof. Sometimes we have to go from the gutter line. Whatever the shortest feed is, the shortest distance, take that. First thing we're gonna do is get power from here with an inline female. So we have our inline female. And Memphis asked me if we wanted to get power from over here. You can, but for ease of taking them down and keeping the line as one, wherever you feed your power from, just run all three dormers with it. That was a great question. What we're gonna have to do is build a jumper from here to here, from here to here, and from here to here. Now, it is possible to shock yourself by putting two males on a line. And I've done it before. And you may think that sounds like idiotic. And it is. But sometimes you get to where you're not paying attention to how the lines are run. And you may have 12 lines on a house. And you forgot that you put a male on that side and that you're getting power from one side when you're actually getting it from the other. But you'll find out real quick if you put a male on a hot line. It'll shock the mess out of you. This one will not be connected to anyone. It's just to cap it. Number six, all the way down that line and way down there. All right, so Memphis said he cut this too short. And really, that is true. But you can still kind of fold that over and get this on here. Now, if you pull too hard on that, it'll start pulling that wire out of the socket and it'll lose connection there. We'll find out in just a second when we plug it in. Remember when we talked about spacing on the first one? As we come back and finish this gutter, you wanna kind of play with your spacing just a little bit. Don't overdo each bulb. Just do a tiny bit to each bulb to get your spacing to where it needs to be. So this, you want this one ending on the corner here. That's why we started this one 15 inches up. Hey, don't forget to hit that like, share, subscribe. Smash those buttons at the bottom if you wanna see more content like this in the future. Always remember. Love, God, love. Others and let your. Let your work show like your. Good enough. We'll catch you on the next one.