GE StayBright 300-Count Multicolor Mini LED Christmas String Lights

Switching from incandescent lights to these LED lights were certainly a visual upgrade, they look fantastic, and the price is pretty reasonable in my opinion. That said, I would advise anyone getting these lights to be prepared for the future maintenance in coming years. I've got a lot of these lights after purchasing them for the last few years (somewhere around 5000+ lights total) and here's what I've found: 1. Especially after the first year, always test your lights at least once before hanging or placing them. Trust me, I've gotten these strands 20-25' up a tree only to find that I've got sections of the strand that aren't lighting up and then have to pull them back down. I personally test once after pulling them out of storage, and then one last time just before putting them up in position just to minimize the chance of having to immediately take them back down to fix a bad light. 2. Prepare early for the process of replacing bulbs. You get a few replacement lights with the roll (also applies to to smaller strands as well) but the replacement lights don't cover all colors in the strand and about half of them don't even fit in the holders. To make matters worse, it's a bit challenging to locate replacement bulbs online that fit correctly. Instead what I would recommend is buying another strand of 50 or 100 and just popping all of the lights out, keeping them in a bag labelled so that you know which strands they go with ("GE LED"), so now you have a variety of replacement lights of varying colors that you know will fit (YOU WILL NEED THESE IN THE COMING YEARS). 3. Replacing bad lights can be a daunting task. The amount of effort depends on the number of strands you've got and how old they are, but by the third year I can easily say that I've replaced at least 50+ lights this year alone. Finding the bad lights can sometimes be made a little easier with a bulb tester but in my opinion it only makes the process marginally better because it gives you a way to test individual lights once you pop them out of the strip to confirm that they're functional but the "bad light finder" functionality is very much hit or miss. After checking a few hundred lights, I usually end up just plugging in the strand and then checking each light that isn't lit, pop them out, check the terminals, and replace with a known good light if the terminals are either missing or damaged. 4. One final tip, if you plan on hanging them up in a tree, bush, etc. where there's going to be a bit of movement (ie. think branches swaying in the wind), be sure to zip tie your strands together. It's not much fun to see your lights go out in the midst of high wind and then have to work out reconnecting them the next day. As long as you're comfortable with dealing with the bad lights year after year (as I imagine is a common issue with all holiday light brands), these lights really do look good and I would recommend them.