Updated LED based Wreath

Original Wreath Everyone is probably familiar with the Cocktail Glass in the West Hills and so when we moved into a house in the same area we figured we should have something similar to share with the city for the holiday season. It's not that simple to make a decoration that is visible and recognizable from blocks away. In the interests of cost and the builders sanity a simple shape would be good. Well cookies have simple shapes so looking through the kitchen drawer up pops the Christmas Wreath, can't get much simpler than that, circles, yeah!

Originally; Well, there are 700 sockets, but there are a couple dozen not filled from fine tuning the image and of course there is about one more burned out bulb per week.

Update 2012; As of 2012 all of the bulbs have been replaced with LEDs.

Update 2015; The red mini light strings with hardwired LEDs finally became available for a reasonable price. They do not have enough brightness for this large scale application so these are 2 strings of the 4 inch spaced red LEDs installed together to simulate 2 inch spacing. The brightness of the green mini lights on the other hand still did not seem to balance with the red so there are still 230 C7 sockets with green LED replacement bulbs screwed in.

The minilight strings improved the ease of setup and takedown because they are permanently attached to the net whereas the C7 strings are just the sockets attached and in order to roll up the net for storage all the C7 bulbs need to be removed. It would be nice to have all minilight strings, but 230 bulbs to screw and unscrew each year is better than 700.

Originally:The ourter circle is 16 feet across made from PVC pipe.

Update 2005; Because we did a remodel on the house which deleted the deck we had to rebuild the wreath to fit on a new deck. An additional goal for the rebuild was to make the image look more like a wreath and make the whole thing easier to store. We added a pair of 1" square steel sockets to the edge of the deck and built 2 20 foot tall aluminum vertical struts with a mounting peg to fit the sockets to provide an upper attachement point for the wreath.

The tops of the struts are joined by a horizontal steel truss with horizontal braces back to the upper story eaves of the house. The truss, braces and a rope from each strut top and bottom back to tie off points on the house provides stability to the struts which are not inherently stiff enough to hold up much of anything. Each strut, strut brace and the top steel truss are separable pieces that don't weigh more than 5 or 10 pounds so they are easy to bring up from the basement and attach to the deck.

Update 2015; The steel top truss was split into two pieces that can be mounted on each strut and then joined together after being raised into position with a really long handled plier like tool. The result is that the whole structure and wreath assembly can be installed and removed by one person with the exception of carrying the rolled up net into and out of the basement and a little steadying of the struts to join the steel truss halves. Those are both doable by my wife who is a little more slight of frame than me. Previously both struts had to be lifted into place together with the steel(heavy) top truss and it's braces all attached which was an ackward, challenging load when trying to align the bottom ends of the struts with their sockets.

The steel truss has a pulley and a clamp on each end to raise and hold the top aluminum truss on the net at the top of the wreath. The wreath itself is nylon bird net 20 feet wide and 20 foot tall. The top and the bottom of the net is attached to aluminum trusses to provide a straight rigid edge to the net. There are also small aluminum rods horizontally at 3 points in the span of the net to help maintain some flatness to the net as the wind is blowing.

There is a hand cranked winch wide enough to wind a nylon rope at each that goes up 2 stories to the pulleys on the top steel truss and then back down to the top aluminum truss. The winch was built wide to allow the two ropes to stay syncronized so the truss/net assembly will remain level as it raises up. Once fully raised the clamps at each end of the steel truss grab the top aluminum truss to hold it in place and the ropes are now used to anchor the top of the struts to the house. The bottom brace has rope attached to anchor to the house through a couple PVC tubes that hold the bottom at a fixed distance from the house.

It looks like a bright spot from the east side of the river, but from about SE 20th over to the west side it looks like a wreath if you look hard.  It is most enjoyable from the Marquam Bridge headed west, Terwilliger Blvd heading north and around the PSU area.

Well the first year it measured 2690 Watts, yes that is more than one circuit worth of power.  For the automobile enthusiasts that is 3.6 HP, for the average homeowner that is a toaster and a microwave at the same time.  We do have a timer so we use the minimum electricity per season.

Update 2012; The power has reduced tremendously. It is now a total of 180 watts, but is still running on a pair of circuits because the power socket for the wreath, the timer and the cords built to reach the mounting location were already in place.