Naperville man brightens Christmas by fixing lights

The frustration of finding one faulty light darkening an entire string of Christmas decor moved Bob Hofmann to act.

He didn't curse in anger, throw the whole thing to the ground and stomp on it in spite.

He gathered his tools, the same kinds he used in a 44-year career as an electrical engineer, and got to work.

Hofmann, 80, would be a magician on the Island of Misfit Toys from the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" movie, if such a place existed.

Using a strategic process he's perfected over the years, the longtime lover of lights fixes malfunctioning strings and donates them to nonprofit resale shops, where they can be sold for charitable causes.

The Naperville man sees several upsides to the unpaid work that keeps him focused in his den, hovering over each string until it shines with brightness to its full potential.

"I can pass the lights on to people, saving them money," he says, for a start.

With more strands working, less of their components, like copper and ground glass, will wind up in landfills, so there's an environmental benefit.

Plus, a tinkerer at heart, Hofmann simply enjoys the challenge.

"I'm used to having a problem and fixing it," he says.

His wife, Marianne, still sells real estate, and Hofmann still helps set industry standards for some technology products. But when Hofmann retired in 2001, he easily found a way to keep working with the electrical issues out of which he'd built a career.

He switched from telephone connections back to his original passion - lights - and settled on the holiday variety.

The decision brought him back to the first spark of his future ahead, when he was 9 years old. His grandmother took Hofmann, then a child in New Jersey, to Macy's in New York City to buy him a Christmas present. Out of all the possible gifts in the store, all he wanted was a set of lights so he could play with the bulbs and wires.

He says his grandmother was surprised, but she obliged and bought him some strands.

"I burned out a lot of bulbs doing experiments," he said.

But some of them worked, and he kept learning. Soon, he was working at Bell Labs, specializing in electromagnetic compatibility, which in the telephone world meant ensuring Bell's products wouldn't interfere with customers' radios or televisions.

The career brought Hofmann and his family to Naperville in 1966, where they found a house with a nice-sized yard and made it home.

In the winter, Hofmann's split-level house never makes any of those lists that point out the best sites to see Christmas lights in Naperville, but that's not the point. It's not that he decorates with an abnormal amount of lights, just that he repairs the castoffs of others with an uncommon measure of care.

First he plugs in each strand, determines what's not working. Diagnoses it. Then he tones down the voltage so he can see beyond the glow, using an adjuster he created especially for the task.

The most common problem, he says, is that strands used outside will get wet, causing issues with the wire leads at the base of each bulb. Damaged leads don't make for a good electrical connection, so the strings stop working.

While new LED lights claim to last a long time, and Hofmann says they usually do, this simple rusty wire problem can disconnect the bulb and any features meant to keep the rest of the strand working.

When he thinks this is the case, he searches for bad leads, sometimes by pulling out each bulb one-by-one with his thumbs and a pair of pliers.

Other times, when an entire string won't brighten, he splits the strand in half to identify the location of the bad bulb. That speeds the work, but it still takes hours in the brown comfy chair, parked in front of the flat-screen, focused on the lights.

Hofmann fixed six boxes worth this year - old-school filament lights and newfangled LED ones, tiny bulbs fit for the indoor tree and much larger sizes best suited for lining the gutters.

It's not quite a year-round hobby; Hofmann doesn't pore over Christmas lights much in July, or during the summer at all. He gardens instead, grateful for the greenery of his property and the time spent outside. He also rides his bike, sometimes more than 20 miles in a day.

But after each Christmas comes and passes, its glitter and glam boxed away, Hofmann goes on the hunt. Several area organizations offer holiday lights recycling, notably the Naperville Park District and the city of Naperville, as an environmental stewardship effort.

So Hofmann hits up collection boxes for the opposite reason than most: to find more lights to rescue. He doesn't tell anyone.

He's not doing it for praise or recognition, just for his own form of fun. Although it is a bit of a lonely hobby, he said he figures others are out there, silently saving lights and using them again. He'd like to connect with those fellow tinkerers, and invites them to email him at hrhofmann@att.net.

The value of his work? In dollars and cents, Hofmann doesn't know, though his fellow suburbanites can be thankful for people like him every time they enjoy a sparkling holiday display.

He doesn't revisit the stores, checking to see how much his refurbished lights are selling for. Once they're functioning, they're not a problem, so they no longer interest him.

But what does hold his interest is finding a better way than the "time-honored method" of trial and error, plucking out each light one by one, to fix tricky malfunctions. Consider it his next experiment.

"I have yet to figure out a way to avoid that," he says.