Need innovative idea for spiraling Christmas lights in taller trees

[Stelzer]

After all my customer's Christmas lights are installed, I end up doing my own home and a few of the trees. I've got a Doug Fir that's about 45" DBH that I light up every year, and each year I go a bit higher. This year I'm shooting for about 75'. Biggest challenge is keeping the remaining strand captive without it getting loose and having the wraps begin to sag as soon as I let go of them. I do red & white all the way down, and last few years I've done a few red, then a few white, and so on, so it's a thicker candy cane profile. Since I'm dealing with multiple strands, (some are over 100' long), the biggest challenge each year is how to keep them and the wraps above them steady as I let go of it. The tree is too big around for me to just try to swing the lights around it and grab it with my other hand, so I can only wind around it with my climbing gear on so many times without having to let go.

Hopefully this makes sense. Ideally, I could fashion some kind of lightweight bendable thing I could attach the lights to, then have it bend around the back side, then grab it with my other hand, but I haven't ever come up with the ideal device, plus having to maneuver that and the lights aloft has proven cumbersome at best. (I've tried pvc, conduit, and a host of other bad ideas).

In the past, I've used spring pinch clamps to try and hold the light strands in place long enough for me to swing around to the other side, but the weight of the strands proves too much more often than not, and the lights give way, then I ascend to clean up the sloppiness. Probably not a big deal for you guys, but for me, it becomes taxing to ascend/descend dozens of times as I try to keep a tight spiral with the lights after having to let go of it.

Best idea I've come up with for this year is to use some smaller cordage to run up and over a fork just above where I start lighting and back down to the ground to create a basal anchor. This would allow me to let go of each light strand and use one of the legs of the cordage anchor to clip to with my spring clamps, just long enough to swing around to the other side to continue the run. My concern though is that between my actual climbing line, lanyard and 6 strands of lights, having to navigate around more obstacles could result in a tangled mess. Apologies if I'm not painting a clear picture.

I've been installing Christmas Lights for 27 years, been doing my own trees for 20, yet still don't have a smart approach to decorating them efficiently. (Slow learner I guess). A boom lift is out of the question. I use lifts for several customer's homes when needed, so although I've used them plenty, I'm not about to spend that kind of money on my own home. Besides, I absolutely love to climb, but I'm not getting any younger, so I thought I'd pick the brains of you pros to see if I could somehow work smarter.

Below is a smaller scale example of what I do with my tree, but several red strands are together and then several white, and it's about twice as high. I'll see if my wife has pics from the last year or 2, since I can't seem to find any on my damn laptop, lol.

 

[Jehinten]

Would keeping the light strands in a canvas lineman bucket or rope bag help? You could hang the bag while you maneuver to reduce the downward weight pulling on your wraps.

Also perhaps a lightweight board with some cup hooks would help temporarily hold things in place?
The red hooks facing down would hang the board from the previous wraps. The green hooks facing up would hold the loose strands.


Just spitballing ideas. I don't hang lights myself, so I haven't tried these out.

 

[Stelzer]

Would keeping the light strands in a canvas lineman bucket or rope bag help? You could hang the bag while you maneuver to reduce the downward weight pulling on your wraps.

Also perhaps a lightweight board with some cup hooks would help temporarily hold things in place?View attachment 96455
The red hooks facing down would hang the board from the previous wraps. The green hooks facing up would hold the loose strands.


Just spitballing ideas. I don't hang lights myself, so I haven't tried these out.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Not sure how practical the board would be since the spirals from above would be wrapped too tightly to allow the board to floss under them, (and I'm assuming that's how they'd have to be secured, unless I'm not following). As for the lights themselves, they are separated in bunches of 10, which is just under half the tree's circumference, then zip-tied, then fastened by the bunch of 40, which allows me to wrap around the tree twice myself before having to unwind, then each wrap of 40 are secured to little carabiners, then attached to 1 big carabiner, then paint hooks are attached, so the actual keeping of the bundle of the lights isn't the issue, it's having to let go of those lights eventually to "right" myself after winding down a ways with the lights.

I've actually hung the lights by the paint hooks by attaching them to lights above which have already been spiraled, but the sheer weight of each bundle inevitably causes slack in the spirals after pulling the hook back out, which is why I'm trying to think of ideas to temporarily secure the lights without having to attach them to lights above. I do appreciate your reply though.

 

[Bart_]

To clarify for tired impaired like me, you are only spiral wrapping the trunk? No branch tippy tips involved?

 

[Stelzer]

To clarify for tired impaired like me, you are only spiral wrapping the trunk? No branch tippy tips involved?

Correct.

 

[Bart_]

I kind of like/understand the basal anchored cord - be odd and tension up and down leg, divides the trunk into 180 degrees spans - for security of letting-go-anchor, itty bitty hitches with biner, guess the downside would be sliding the hitch down under the lighting strand - or would you go 1/2 wrap at a time and avoid? just tossing passing thoughts out there

 

[Stelzer]

I kind of like/understand the basal anchored cord - be odd and tension up and down leg, divides the trunk into 180 degrees spans - for security of letting-go-anchor, itty bitty hitches with biner, guess the downside would be sliding the hitch down under the lighting strand - or would you go 1/2 wrap at a time and avoid? just tossing passing thoughts out there

Possibilities are endless really if I go to basal anchor with cordage. I could bring up other small scraps of cord and rig prusiks on each leg of the anchors to securely hold the lights.
Actually, "basal anchor" isn't really accurate, since I'd need to secure both legs at the base of the tree in order for it to work. Poor use of terminology on my part.

 

[Stumpsprouts]

Possibilities are endless really if I go to basal anchor with cordage. I could bring up other small scraps of cord and rig prusiks on each leg of the anchors to securely hold the lights.
Actually, "basal anchor" isn't really accurate, since I'd need to secure both legs at the base of the tree in order for it to work. Poor use of terminology on my part.

I’ve done this trunk wrap style for a handful of years at the arboretum. You have to pull them fairly tight but I find they keep their wraps fairly well most of the time- some slick barked species can slip more and I have to use zip ties to fix them. There were a few that had concave trunks where I took a twig and wrapped the light strand in a half hitch as I went up the stem, capturing the stick and that really helped a lot in keeping the wraps in place. I didn’t have much of an issue with the bundle of light weight, I usually held the wrap in one hand and stepped on my foot ascender and tended device with one hand to ascend while keeping some tension on the light strand. Once you get to the branches, you can dangle the ball of lights downward which holds the tension for the wraps below.

We pre wrapped the strands in balls with the female end on the outside and worked from the bottom upwards, unraveling the ball as we went.

This is all hard to describe in words but I hope you get the drift.

 

[climbingmonkey24]

These were multi-day projects. Lots of lights, multiple extension chords, etc. But always very enjoyable to do each year.

 

[Bart_]

I envisioned starting to spiral from the top with dangling strings hanging straight down beside the clear trunk - hence incrementing the third-hand hitch/biner to support the dangling string preventing unwrap.

I've only ever done a small co-dom ash tree putting the lights out among the branches with the help of a Pruning Stik. Like macro velcro I say

Starting to feel Christmas-ey around here

 

[Stelzer]

I envisioned starting to spiral from the top with dangling strings hanging straight down beside the clear trunk - hence incrementing the third-hand hitch/biner to support the dangling string preventing unwrap.

I've only ever done a small co-dom ash tree putting the lights out among the branches with the help of a Pruning Stik. Like macro velcro I say

Starting to feel Christmas-ey around here

Agreed. I've spiraled thousands of trees, most of which are done top down. With the advancement in SMD LED lights, it's not as big of headache as old school incandescent lights where you had a 25% chance of them burning out before the install, (and a 25% chance of breaking them). The strands I'm dealing with are huge and there's 6 of them. I can't imagine trying to do that from the ground up, but if it works for some people, I think that's great.

I think I'm going with the rope up & over a union above my lights and anchored to each side of the base of the tree, which gives me 2 clip points to hold the strands while I reposition. I'll post pics when done, but it may be several days. Have a few "surprise" jobs I'm doing for family as soon as they go out of town later today.

 

[evo]

I vastly prefer to hang light globes vs wrapped Christmas lights. They aren’t to hard to make and there is a few different options out there for bigger spheres. Stringing the extension cords is still a little bit of a pita but it avoids dealing with all the tangles.

 

[Stumpsprouts]

With the advancement in SMD LED lights, it's not as big of headache as old school incandescent lights where you had a 25% chance of them burning out before the install, (and a 25% chance of breaking them). The strands I'm dealing with are huge and there's 6 of them. I can't imagine trying to do that from the ground up, but if it works for some people, I think that's great.

This is a big reason why we went from bottom to up at the arboretum (this is big budget, 4-5 climbers working full time on it for a month leading up to it kind of thing). The top of the line LEDs would still fail approximately 5-10% of the time, from squirrels or UV mostly. You can catch most of the failures on the ground but sometimes a wire gets frayed as you're wrapping it up or whatever and there goes your afternoon. The splitters would fail somewhat more frequently.

I'm looking at this still from a production standpoint so maybe not relevant to your inquiry, but having smaller strands would be easier to deal with.

I vastly prefer to hang light globes vs wrapped Christmas lights.

Agreed, and they look way more interesting. I'm experimenting with some solar powered LEDS on my wooden orbs this year, I should go out and turn them on and see if they work, but it's really, really cold out there right now!

 

[evo]

These work awesome for managing cords

https://badassextensioncords.com/cdn/shop/files/MOX12030BK_Gallery_Outlet-FTR.png?v=1695058962&width=1100

 

[Stumpsprouts]

One of the more raucous connection points at the arboretum.



Caleb in a Kentucky Coffeetree. You gotta get out and up.



One of my orbs. So simple.

 

[evo]

That first photo is going to give me nightmares

 

[DRBetz]

What is you had to climbing systems in the tree and swapped to untangle things once you've gone around the tree a few times? Then you would have to leave you light strands and worry about slack.

 

[Jehinten]

Bumping an old thread. We visited these two "magic trees" in Columbia Missouri today. The smaller one had 27,500 lights and the larger sycamore has over 8 miles of Christmas lights.

 

[Matias]

That's awesome. I thought these came out great. and is what I had in mind to do at my house when I start doing it.

 

[Bart_]

If you're going to invest in your own lights try to get the most non-velcro non-snaggy strings possible. I'd say snagging is 75% of the battle.