Have some Christmas lights you just didn't get around to hanging? Turn them into a some ambient lighting with a wine bottle and some tinkering.
Lifehacker Labs is a chance for us to show you how we've used tips and tricks from Lifehacker, revisited old ones, and even improved upon them in the process. We promise we wore safety glasses the whole time and everyone signed a waiver.
Last month we shared a clever DIY project: filling a bottle with Christmas lights to create a novel source of ambient light.
It seemed like a simple enough project so we donned our safety glasses and gave it a shot. We tested out two different bottle colors and two different types of lights. Our first test bottle was a dark brown bottle that we filled with LED Christmas lights. Our second bottle was a cobalt blue bottle that we filled with white incandescent lights.
After the experiment, we have several observations to share. The first one is that drilling holes in glass isn't as big a pain as you'd think. The drill bit was $19 and the process only took about 30 seconds per bottle. Second, we were surprised at how cool the bottles remained once they were strung with lights—the heat issue had been a concern in the comments of the original post.
We ran both bottles, the LED and the incandescent, for 6 hours with the opening of the bottles blocked by a meat thermometer dangling down inside. The LED bottle didn't get hotter inside than 80F and the incandescent bottle didn't get hotter than 120F. The latter temperature isn't what anyone would call cool but it's far from dangerous.
Our final observation is that LED lights, while a good choice for energy efficiency and cool operating temperature, didn't look that great. They were too bright, so bright in fact that we ended up frosting the bottles using the spray we had leftover from our DIY Sun Jar project. We frosted both bottles which was a nice touch—the light and the wires inside made interesting patterns on the glass. Check out the photo below to see the blue bottle after the frosting.

One thing to consider if you opt to use LED lights. Most LED Christmas lights have a transformer on the line itself, which is too big to fit through the 1/2" hole you'll be drilling in the bottle. We ended up having to cut the line and feed it through the mouth of the bottle and rewire the socket. You can avoid that hassle by using incandescent lights.
That's it for this week's Lifehacker Lab, but don't let us have all the fun. We have a Lifehacker Tips Tester pool on Flickr for you to show off your your favorite Lifehacker tips, tricks, and hacks in action. If you've used a tip from Lifehacker, we'd love to see photos of your results in the tester pool!

</img>
</img>
</img> </img> </img> </img>