I missed the first 5 minutes, so maybe I’ve their hypothesis wrong, but what in the ever-living hell does hanging 500 lights on a tree for 8 hours demonstrate vis-a-vis house fires caused by Christmas trees?
All they proved was that 500 lights wouldn’t burn up a tree in 8 hours!
You’d have to leave that sucker up for at least 2 weeks, 5 hrs/day - really dry that tree out! Nobody takes their tree down after 1 day!
And add some power fluctuations for when the homeowners are running the vacuum to suck up all those needles - wouldn’t that put additional stress on the wires? My Aunt’s house caught on fire b/c of the additional power load from workmen doing renovations.
And what about the 15x/day the little rugrats turn the lights off and on? Isn’t that another stressor (I know it is for the parents).
Candy canes! Hang some candy canes next to those lights, let that plastic wrapper melt - that’ll do it!
I saw it on another night, and I forget if they had a really pre-dried-out tree or what, sorry.
I did like seeing that they definitively showed that overloading an extension cord is really bad news. I think the cord got up to 275 F (visibly smoking, even) before it burst into flames.
Now that I think about it, my main complaint was that they only tested two kinds of bulbs. Seems like the colored bulbs might get hotter than the clear ones. I don’t know why they didn’t at least mention them.
I haven’t seen the episode, but it seems to me that the likely cause of fire would not be heat from the bulbs. Rather, if the insulation wears down and exposes the wires, an electrical spark can do it. The US Fire Administration has videos of a tree catching fire. In the second video you can hear an electric discharge that sets off the fire. Whether the fire was set by purposefully damaged lights or some other method, I don’t know. The National Fire Protection Association has some statictics on tree fires and their causes.
Seems to me that Mythbusters is being pretty irresponsible here.
I would recommend seeing the episode first, before accusing them of irresponsibility. They spent a lot of time on the electric spark, with an excellent demonstration of the danger of overloading extension cords, and the final fire was caused by a spark.
The net conclusion was that lights alone won’t light your tree on fire, as they just don’t generate enough heat, but electric sparks will.
They pointed out that new lights will have the protective fuse built in but there have got to be millions of people out there using ancient friggin lights they’ve had in their attic since the 70s. My in-laws have a few strings of those big ceramic bulb type lights and they get HOT. Get yourself a bone dry tree, hot lights, paper, plastic tinsel and I think you could get a fire without any short.
Maybe, but they were only hitting temperatures in the high 200’s (F). Paper doesn’t spontaneously ignite until well over 400, and I imagine wood, needles, etc. have even higher ignition points. I just don’t think the lights alone are enough to do it – and predicted as much after they gave the temperature results from their “hot pots.”
My (mild) peeve of the Mythbusters is their insistence on testing things that can be mathematically worked out, or for which results have been well defined. Here, for example, I think they should have figured after the initial temperature tests that they didn’t have the requisite heat (let’s call it 451 F for simplicity), and tried to find ways to get it hotter rather than just trying it fruitlessly. But doing equations makes for lousy TV, so I understand their motivations (especially when you know they’ll get a fire before the end of the episode, even if they have to make their ornaments out of C4, gasoline, and antimatter).
not a warn out string, but they did overload a 1970’s era cord. THe coating on the wire melted and a huge spark was thrown out. If it had been on a very dry tree it would have gone up like a roman candle.
I was disappointed by the whole Christmas light myth thing to. They admitted it towards the end, that it felt less like a myth-busting and more like a Christmas PSA.
But the whole episode wasn’t bad, now if I can only get the image of Kari in her pj’s out of my head.
I don’t watch MYTHBUSTERS regularly, because when I’ve seen it, they tend to rely on a single test. If you’re looking for a positive, that can be enough, but when they’re trying to disprove something, then the single-test set up doesn’t do it.
Started off well in Sept. with Hollywood Myths 2. Awning landing and ejection seat were nice. Then really crappy since then. Examples:
Salami rocket revisited. The original was bad enough. (Clearly it was the NOx that got it airborne.) The revisit seemed to be deliberately set up to fail completely. What was the point?
Concrete gliders. Just 2 guys fooling around. Meaningless.
The “build team” segments are getting even more inane than they were before. Dump the 3 goofballs and just use the regular M5 people.
Most of the Xmas tree light stuff was clearly done badly. There was partial redemption at the end using the kiln-dried tree but it was clearly not done well. E.g., in certain cases adding a heat source cools down nearby objects due to generating convection. So overdoing the lights might have negated the very effect they were looking for. More sloppy testing.
The build team’s preservative test was far from scientific. You need many trees for each preservative. Trees vary greatly in how long they will last after cutting. Maybe the “Santa’s Little Helper” tree just happened to be a good needle holder regardless of what was in the water.
The jellyfish sting test needed a control: a no treatment patch. Maybe neither treatment actually did anything and the sting went away just from the cleaning.
And the less said about the anti-gravity segment, the better.
Jamie clearly doesn’t care about the show at all anymore and Adam is just doing it for the goofiness.
ftg, I agree with your comments regarding the recent episodes, but I think your conclusion is a little drastic. I think there’s a simpler explanation: They’re running out of myths. That’s something that I wondered about from the beginning of the show, and a worry they confirmed with occasional desperate-sounding requests to the audience to send in things for them to test. There just aren’t that many well-known modern legends, and after 4 seasons they’ve done all the good ones.
Then why don’t they take on the airplane on a treadmill? I know it was talked about to death on their website’s message board, so they know about it. That’s big enough that they could probably devote an entire episode to just that one question. Yeah, I know that it’s not a myth, strictly speaking, but if they need more material, why not branch out into highly disputed questions?
Forget the plane on a treadmill, I want to see a truckload of birds on a scale!
I don’t see them running out of things to try. The “Confederate rocket” was definitely obscure and was great. The idea of getting a functional homebrew rocket to go at all on the first try is amazing. The bullet fuse to the groin was also great. OTOH, the human slingshot across the border thing was also obscure and pointless to even try.
They don’t seem to be out of ideas to try, it’s which ones they pick and what they do with them that seems to be the problem.
I agree with this. I’ve never heard of 80% of the “popular myths” on their show.
I’m sure Jamie and Adam are very knowledgeable in matters of science - moreso than me without a doubt - but the show is for entertainment purposes only. I don’t think I’ve ever sat through a whole episode without some groan-worthy errors and omissions.