What's Christmas Without the Lights?

This time of year it's very common to see homeowners getting into the holiday spirit by decorating with all sorts of lights, but how much is too much? All those lights can lead to a lot of blackouts if you aren't careful, just like this reader;

"I just finished hanging all my lights outside and lighting my tree, when I plugged them in a bunch of lights in my house went out. What happened? How do I fix this?"

 Are you trying to do one of those Christmas displays that can be seen from outer space like this one?

The most likely problem is that the circuit has been overloaded. It can be easy to daisy chain a bunch of lights together and end up drawing more power than one circuit is designed to handle. The other thing is to consider what else may be on that circuit, is there a space heater or other electricity heavy device on the same unit? This is the sort of thing that can cause the circuit to overload.

The first thing to do will be to unplug some of the lights and reset the breaker. If the lights are still off then it's possible that you have a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI), in which case you will need to reset that as well, they look like this:

A GFCI will have a small reset button on them that will need to be pressed if they get tripped. After resetting all of the GFCIs, if the lights still aren't on then it's time to contact a professional.