Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Let it bokeh, let it bokeh, let it bokeh

More experimentation with my "wall of lights."

More about the lights in my home: My wife and I have eight Christmas trees in our house - seven smaller ones and the main tree in our living room. Our philosophy is "you can never have enough lights." Two years ago, our main tree sported 900 miniature lights. Last year and this year we "cut back" to 175 lights; but they're the larger C7 bulbs, so the wattage is pretty close to what it has been. When the trees are fired up, we can cut the room lights and pretty much not miss them.

This year, we located the main tree to a new location in our living room. Two nights ago, my wife mentioned that it was getting pretty chilly upstairs. I knew that I had not touched the thermostat and just chalked it up to an especially chilly night we were having. She mentioned it again the next night and then it dawned on me - we had placed the tree with a combined 700 watts of light about two feet from the thermostat in the living room.

I checked the temperature on the thermostat and it was registering a balmy 75 degrees, all due to the heat generated by our tree. Since the thermostat itself was set at 70, it felt no need to send heat to the rest of the house. Oops.

Click on this post's headline for image EXIF data. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool bokeh pictures.
And you guys ROCK for having that many trees and lights in your house! (I'm thinking of the scene from Nat'l Lampoon's Christmas Vacation...trying to get his lights to light up!)

James said...

Nothing near the 25,000 lights that Clark Griswald used. If anyone's curious, here's the scene:

jeff said...

I assume you left the tree where it was and told the wife to put a sweater on?

James said...

jeff, no way was the tree moving after it was up. We bump the thermostat up when the tree is on and set it back when the tree is off.