How do Christmas lights work? How are they wired so that if one light goes out they all go out? And how does using one of those light guns fix all of them?
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As others have said the old Christmas lights are wired in series so the electricity passes through each bulb in the entire circuit. But this would mean that if a single light’s filament broke the entire string would stop working, so to avoid that bulbs tend to have a “shunt” within them which will allow electricity to pass through the bulb even if the filament breaks. This way a single bulb going out isn’t going to make the whole string go dark even when wired in series.
But, sometimes those shunts also have problems with them and again a single bad bulb will make the entire string go dark. There is a second shunt within the socket itself which can allow the string to light if a bulb is entirely missing, but that shunt doesn’t come into action when there is a bulb with a shunt (working or not) in place. So what the light guns do is create a special electrical pulse that is designed to burn out and destroy a shunt that is blocking electrical flow. This gun should destroy the problem shunt within a bulb and allow the fallback shunt within the socket to being working and light up the strand. That one bulb will still not work but now it is really easy to find.
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