Okay, I have been around here several decades now and have seen quite a bit. This is something I have not been able to figure out. We have a string of LED lights out back on a patio powered by an Inverter on some batteries in the garage. The inverter is a 3500W unit I use for some power tools in the garage, to charge battery packs and power these string lights through a timer switch. The inverter and batteries are on a wooden cart so we can roll around the shop.
The string lights are plugged directly into the timer switch output and set to come on around 6 pm and off at 11 pm. There is a string of 150 in series with two strings of 100. They are a cool white LED. What was totally odd was a few nights ago when I was up past 11, I noticed the end section of lights were on but not the rest.
Upon closer examination I noticed that only 25 leds on this last string were on and they were not fully on and appeared to be dimmed to half brightness. No other LEDs on the rest of the string were illuminated like this. I checked the timer switch which was off, with no DC potential and 30 mV AC, measured with a Fluke 789 at the plug. When plugged into the switch the lights were glowing and when unplugged they went completely dark like the rest of the string. The 25 that were lit were the next to last 25 on the last string and were between these odd items between every 25 or so LEDs. Any idea what these plug looking items are and what would cause this odd effect to just that section of LEDs.
