Wire Light LED Strand - 10 Red LEDs + Coin Cell Holder [discontinued]

Add sparkle to your project with these lovely silver wire LED strands. These strands are very interesting, they use two silver wires that are coated so they don't short if they touch, then tiny 1000mcd LEDs are bonded onto the wires and coated with epoxy. The result is a very flexible silver wire with sparkly "fairy" lights that are much less visible than normal LEDs. They're still just LEDs, but in a fun new form-factor! They're even waterproof - you can dunk these or have them outdoors, just be sure to protect the battery holder.

Each strand comes with 10 LEDs, approximately 5cm/2 inches apart for a 2 foot long strand of wire. The photo shows an earlier version with 12 LEDs, only 10 LEDs are on the fairy lights! At one end of the magnet wire, a double stranded-core wire is soldered on and heat-shrinked to protect it. A 2 x CR2032 coin cell holder with on/off switch is on the other side. Of course, if you want you can just cut the coin cell holder off and solder on a 3xAAA battery holder or 3xAA battery holder. To solder to the magnet wire, scrape off the coating first.

Requires 2 x CR2032 batteries to run. We do stock CR2032 batteries if you want to use them as is. Runs for about 8 hours continuously on two CR2032's.

Please note: There are no series resistor installed in the strand, if you want to use another supply you will need to calculate and solder in a resistor. The reason that two 3V coin cells can be used to drive LEDs with a forward voltage of about 2.1V is that coin cells have an internal resistance that makes up for the lack of a choke resistor. If you want to drive these via a 6V power supply, you'll want to put in a 47-470 ohm (or larger) resistor in series to avoid burning out the LEDs. If you want to use a 4.5V power supply, use 20-220 ohms (or larger).

Technical Details