Christmas Tree Storage Bags
Artificial Christmas Trees are expensive pieces of furniture. The best way to store a Christmas tree is with a proper storage bag.
Review our complete line of Artificial Christmas Tree Storage Bags.
Helpful Hints Not in Video
As you can see in the video, the branches were not compressed toward the center pole. This was my mistake, I forgot to bring material to wrap to the video shoot.
It is helpful to compress the branches toward the center pole. We've found two techniques which work well:
1. U-Haul Mover's wrap such as that found at UHaul.com.
2. Another option is a pair of panty hose.
U-Haul Mover's Wrap
The purpose of this compression is to hold the branches close to the center pole. This will help prevent you from getting your fingers squished and will help compress the tree into a smaller space. You do not want to compress the tree too much but enough to hold all of the branches firmly.
Twine or rope are not a good idea because either can damage the wires or branch tips.
Important Points about Tree Storage
1. Be gentle and patient.
2. Use a storage device NOT the original box
3. Story in a cool dry area
4. Most damage to trees occurs during set up, take down and storage.
Transcript:
Right now we’re going to talk about the end of the season and how to properly take down that new artificial Christmas tree to take care of it, to preserve the life of your investment.
The first thing that we want to do is we want to inspect the lights on the top section of the tree. It’s better now to look for burn out lights and go through them and replace them now rather than have to worry about it when we take the tree up next year.
So I’m going to go through right now and inspect the lights and I’m going to unfluff the top section of the tree. What I mean by that is taking the branches and bending them back towards the center pole just like we did. Remember the top section doesn’t have hinges, it’s a little bit different and so we’re getting all of the branches, point it back to the same direction because we don’t want to rip off one of the pine cones or damage one of the light bulbs.
Now that we got this all squished up, we’ll set that down for use in just a moment.
The next section we’ll turn the lights back on. And we would go around and inspect all the bulbs, make sure that none of them are burned out and again now we’re going to go through and un-fluff this portion of the tree that has the movable branches. Let’s start from outer side. Remember when we fluff that we started from the inside. We want to do this exactly the opposite and we squish that back from being a starfish; squish it back towards the center, the main piece of the branch. Again we’re doing this to protect the bulbs and to protect the branch.
I’m going to unfluff the tree, get everything back together so it’s all squished up. And I’m also going to shut off the lights, unplug this section B from section C and I’ll be right back with you.
We’ve checked this section to make sure all the bulbs are working properly and we’ve unfluffed this section so we’re be able to compress it down and to help take care of the tree. Now we’re going to take this section B off from section C. We turn it upside down and as we turn it upside down, it’s like an umbrella and we’ll lay this down, put away in a moment.
Now we got section C, we’re going to turn the lights back on. Go through and inspect all the lights, all the bulbs, make sure they’re all working. It looks like they are. Now we’re going to go through and shut off the power. We’ve got the section C. We got it unfluffed. When we went through and unfluffed it we did have a sub-branch that we had to bend the branch back to the main branch to take care of that. We’ve unplugged the section, from the bottom section.
Now this is sometimes tricky, you might want to twist it a little bit to try to make sure that section D doesn’t come along with section C, flip it upside down. All the branches are sitting back into their hinges just the way we want them to. Now we go ahead and lay this down.
One section to go! Again we turn the lights back on and now it’s very easy to see that all the bulbs are on properly. Now we go through and unfluff the bottom section, last section unfluffed. Christmas is about to be done for this year. We got to unplug the tree, reach down we got an eye hook down here that we want to unscrew. Now we’ve got it unscrewed, lift it out of the stand and again turn it upside down. Bring the cord up, we want to place it in the box, place it into the storage bag. It’s okay to squish just not really hard. We want to get all the branches we feel confident that the branches going to stay where we put them. Grab the next section; that was section C. Now we’ve got section B, again I’m not pushing down very hard, trying to be gentle.
Lastly section A and the stand. Zip it up. We don’t want to push too hard, we don’t want to damage the tree, and we don’t want to damage any of the bulbs.
One point, it’s a big point we want to store our tree in something that’s designed to store Christmas trees. We really don’t want to store it in a box. The reason why is that the cardboard box that comes with it is going to deteriorate over time, dust is going to settle on your tree. That dust will permanently attach itself to that tree plus vermin love to chew on boxes. And once they get inside the box they love to live inside the artificial Christmas tree. So you really want something that’s a very durable device and this one. What’s great about this one? We have wheels.
Next, let’s talk about how to fix Christmas lights that are not working properly.
