How To Make A Mega Tree

Here’s a very brief discussion on how we did the mega tree. I get asked about it a lot, so I wanted to tell how “we do it”. Keep in mind that there are probably easier or different ways to get the same effect.

Materials: Sunsetter flagpole, wood dowel, door hooks, 20 strobe lights, strand of C7 lights (minus the C7 bulbs), zip ties, 20 ft conduit, 12 2ft pieces rebar, 36 strands mini lights (we used walmart 100 ct mini lights-green), misc hardware for the guy wires that keep the flagpole from falling over, steel cable (again for the guy wires), Light-O-Rama controller and software, 2 12-gauge extension cords, 12 dollar store extension cords, star tree topper

We use strobe lights screwed into old C7 light strands. These can be bought on the internet. I bought mine here.

We made the topper from a Lowes dowel and door hooks.

The guy wires are the tricky part. We have 6 (3 from the top and 3 from the middle). They hook onto rebar that was pounded into the ground.

Here’s the conduit that forms the inner and outer rings. It’s held into the ground with rebar and duct tape (oh my).

Here’s the guy wires on the rebar.

 

Here’s the controller that makes the tree blink to the music. It was between $100-200…I can’t remember if I got it on sale or not. Each of the two main power cords gets plugged into a separate GFI outlet with a 10-12 gauge extension cord. Then, there are 16 cords which come out of the box…they look like tentacles. Our tree does not use all 16 tentacles. Here’s how we have it set up:

• 12 of the tentacles have lights plugged into them. We have 12 main slices and each slice has 3 strands of 100 ct. minis.
• 1 of the tentacles is dedicated to the strobe lights
• 1 of the tentacles is dedicated to the star

That’s right…2 of our 16 channels (tentacles) are unused! What a waste.

Hope this helps…in the next few years, the over-the-counter products are going to get much better and this type of mega tree will likely become obsolete. Until then, if you want to build your own version of this, drop me a line, visit planetchristmas.com, or invent something new. Good luck!!!