Introduction
When I’m not roadkeeking or bicycling, in the cold parts of the Minnesota, I’m working with miniature holiday villages. A lot of villagers are more interested in the artistry of it all, building miniature villages for Halloween and Christmas. I’m less an artist as opposed to an electrical nerd, my father was an electrical engineer so I learned a few things. So I’m sharing this so you don’t have to get too involved in it. The intent of this is
- YouTuber Derek of “Random Junk” noted older Department 56 (D56) unregulated power supplies put out in excess of their stated voltage. Since I have some expensive D56 pieces that are difficult to find, I wanted to determine if this is a problem.
- In particular he fixed a Spider House where the LED resistor was badly charred. The thesis was A) An overvoltage condition caused by the incandescent bulb blowing out, or B) a short, so I was curious to see which scenario is more likely
- I wanted to document actual current draw of what I have, so I know how many pieces I can put on generic power supplies- the current draw of your pieces cannot exceed the power supply rating.
Power Supplies 101
The first thing is they’re rated in voltage, the “force” or electricity, and Amperage, the “volume” of electricity. Voltage needs to match the piece exactly, and the sum of the amperage of the pieces attached cannot exceed the total capacity of the supply. Then there’s AC vs DC. And there’s various supplies out there
- Generic power supplies of the same voltage and current as village pieces that can be used with them
- “Branded” general power supplies sold by Lemax and Department 56 intended for use with multiple village pieces that might not be supplied with their own adapter. These generally have multiple outputs
- “Branded” power supplies that are included with a piece and intended to be used only with that piece.
The most common branded general power supplies out there are the Lemax 3 volt 1000 ma with their 3.5 mm pin connector (older Lemax accessories), Department 56 3 volt 550 ma (D56 accessories) and Lemax 4.5 volt barrel (most lighted buildings). There’s also a Menards power supply sold with their train stuff that does 4.5 volts at 2000 ma. Those two voltages were chosen because 3 volts can be supplied by two “C” batteries and can light non-blue and white LEDs, 4.5 volts can light blue and white LEDs. But barrel connectors might also supply oddball voltages, so you must make sure that the adapter and piece both have the same voltage before plugging them in together even though they’ll physically fit. Villagers have destroyed pieces accidently plugging a 12 volt supply into a 4.5 volt piece. Power supplies come in “conventional” and “switching”, with switching using modern electronics to reduce the bulk of the actual transformer. Incoming electricity gets electronically converted to a higher frequency which enables a much smaller magnetic transformer to be use. With non-regulated supplies, the voltage will vary somewhat depending on what the load it, regulated supplies have additional circuitry to prevent that. Non regulated supplies are sort of OK if you know what you’re powering with it and can make sure the actual loaded voltage delivered is appropriate, but shouldn’t be used otherwise. The “general” supplies are all regulated, the older D56 supplies meant for a specific building were unregulated. Although the only way to tell for sure is to measure they behavior of the output voltage, regulated supplies tend to be switching supplies which are much lighter than conventional supplies.
Here’s your basic AC unregulated supply. Just a transformer. The idea is you can transfer energy between electrical and magnetic with a coil of fine wire, with the amount of voltage corresponding to the number of wires. Energy comes in one side, is transferred to magnetic energy into an iron core, then back into electrical energy with a coil of wire on the output. With different ratios of the number of turns in the wire, you can change the voltage. There’s a few older D56 pieces that use AC voltage, but 99% of Villaging stuff is DC. To get your basic unregulated DC supply you add a diode to convert the AC to DC, and a capacitor to help smooth the output. The limitation with these is the output current varies somewhat with the load applied, so you need to know what load you have. Older D56 piece-specific supplies used these, picking a supply (as we’ll find out mostly) appropriate for the load of an individual piece.
An enhancement to these is adding a voltage regulator. Now the output voltage should stay about the same no matter what the load is. There’s fixed voltage regulators for common desired output voltages like 5 or 9. Lemax used a variable voltage regulator, the LM3817, with their oddball 4.5 volts. Voltage is set by the resistor divider between the control pin. The disadvantage of these is they still require a full sized transformer with all it’s iron and copper, and a lot of energy is wasted, note the huge heatsink to dissipate the wasted heat. Older Lemax supplies meant for a single piece use this design.
Finally, you have what are called switching power supplies. Transformers can accept electronically pulsed DC as well as “naturally” pulsed AC. Here incoming AC electricity is converted to DC with the four diodes in a full wave bridge, then the negative side is switched on and off 60,000 times a second with the Viper22A IC. Transformers can be much smaller when operated at high frequencies, note how much smaller the physical supply and actual transformer is. You can also control the output voltage by varying the duty cycle of the on time so it’s trivially easy to integrate regulation, and in practice is almost always done. At lower right is the feedback circuit, a reference voltage is generated with a resister network and a zenar diode (which will start to conduct in reverse only once a specific threshold voltage is met) which through an optoisolater tells the IC what the output voltage is, so it can respond accordingly. Since it’s a bit complicated I’ve highlighted the path through the supply.
Note the comparitive size of the yellow transformer on left vs the black transformer on right for roughly the same amount of current.
D56 3 volt bulbs
D56 seemed to step cautiously into the LED era. After a quarter century of building houses lit with just a mains voltage inside, they started to adorn the outside with LEDs while keeping the incandescent internal illumination. This started with the likes of “Hauntsburg House” where the bulb was mains voltage and the power supply for the LED was built into the house. Soon they developed a 3 volt bulb so they could use “wall-wart” power supplies, which is standard design practice because your device itself doesn’t neet to get UL certified and you can just buy a power supply that meets your needs rather than build your own. Intially these came with cords that had a the transformer, the socket, and then a molex connector for the LED strings. Later they switched to standard power supplies with a standard barrell connector, the bulb socket is connected to the internal wiring. These bulbs are rated at 3.5 volts at .3 ma; as will be discussed further I’m not a fan of trying to swap them out for LED since the unregulated power supplies of the era were selected with their load in mind, and they only consume about a watt, compared to 4-7 watts of similar looking mains voltage bulbs. Although they’re expensive they should also last a long time since in practice they’re driven at under their rating. A package of orange and blue ones is also available, my Spider House came with an orange one but I swapped it out for the correct white. Current draw is about 240 ma at 3 volts.
Investigating the D56 Halloween branded supplies
Department 56 in general has continued to use “oddball” voltages and connectors, their accessories continue to use 3 volt pin connectors, and they’ve put out a few 3 volt buildings in recent history. While watching YouTuber “Random Junk Channel” attempting to repair a burned out resistor on the “Spider House”, he noted the voltage of some of unregulated power supplies that came with the older pieces are metaphorically shocking and speculated that a bulb burning out could have thrown too much current on the LED resistor, causing it to burn out due to the unregulated suppy. So I decided to play around with my village pieces. They are from left to right, the “Spider House”, the “Scarecrow House” and Grimsley Garage. Spider and Grimsley have a 3 volt incandescent bulb and LED decorations on the outside, the rest are all LED. My workbench is equipped with a Fluke multimeter and a bench type professional power supply, that can deliver much better regulation that “wall wart’ type supplies. Here’s a view of my desk (along with some other random stuff to fix- the neighbor kid’s biking helmet needs pads glued back on and she wants her Halloween earring hooks swapped out for titanium).
First the basic electrical specs and results:
| Name | D56 Part Number | Power Supply Type | Supply Manufactuer / Model Number | Rated Voltage | Measured Voltage Unloaded | Measured Voltage Loaded | Rated Current of supply | measured ma of piece at rated voltage |
| Grimsly Garage (lamp + LED) | 56.54706 | Conventional Unregulated | 3 | 5.9 | 3.9 | 500 | 241 | |
| Grimsly Manor | 56.55004 | Conventional Unregulated | CHD DPX412012 | 6 | 7.2 | 800 | ||
| Haunted Mansion (lamp + motor) | 56.54935 | Conventional Unregulated | E146885 | 12 | 15.8 | 12 | ||
| Trick or Treat Lane Kraken House | 6011436 | Switching Regulated | YouBei YB052-0450.50-2A | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 400 | 52 |
| Trick or Treat Lane Mummy House | 6007783 | Switching Regulated | 4.5 | |||||
| Trick or Treat Lane with Peanuts | 6007640 | Switching Regulated | YouBei YB052-0450050-2A | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 400 | 98 |
| Trick or Treat Lane Scarecrow House | 4044881 | Conventional Unregulated | 3 | 7.8 | 4.0 | 300 | 94 | |
| Trick or Treat Lane Spider House (lamp + LED) | 4025340 | Conventional Unregulated | 3 | 6.0 | 3.1 | 400 | 268 (at 3.1 volts) | |
| 3 | ||||||||
Here are some more details of my findings.
Scarecrow House should not be used with the supplied adapter. Although there’s the possibility my adapter is simply is defective, when loaded it puts out 3.9 volts which is too much for this design. The scarecrow has a 100R resistor which is OK with this voltage, but the six house LEDs each have their own 56R resistor, and draw 200 milliamps total of current. I’m assuming D56 used standard 20 ma LEDs, so when you divide 200 by 6, you get 33 ma of current going through them. That’s obviously not enough to blow them out immediately, but will dramaticaly shorten their life. I bought a random switching power supply, but that output 3.5 volts which is really too much. For next season I’m going to build an adapter to use the barrel connection with the generic pin type D56 3 volt supply. Other options would be swapping in 82R or 100R resistors to be able to use with the supplie stock power supply. Changing both house and scarecrow LEDs to 120R or 150R would allow you to use it with the same 4.5 volt supply you power everthing else with. Lemax uses 100R for most of their LEDs at 4.5 volts but that operates them close to their rating which I’d prefer not to do.
Spider House uses a 56R resistor to drive ten older design UV LEDs with around a 3.0 forward voltage (more common UV LEDs nowadays are 2.8 volts). It would actually not light when powered with 3.0 volts from the bench supply, I had to increase it to 3.1 volts which is coincidently what the supplied adapter outputs under load. YouTuber “Random Junk Channel” had a Spider House with a blown resistor that he was repairing, with a possible theory that the incandescent bulb blew resulting in too much load on the resistor. I wasn’t about to possibly ruin a Spider House, so I built a mockup of the circuit with the lamp, resistor, and LEDs.
Under normal conditions each of the 10 UV LEDs are only a couple of milliamps and the resistor disspates only about 1 /100th of a watt. When the incandescent bulb is unscrewed, missing, or burned out, 4 volts at 167 millamps goes to the LEDs, each LED getting 16.7 milliamps and the resistor dropping .67 volts for a 1/8th of a watt. That won’t hurt the LEDs and they’ll still probably last as long as you have the piece, but that’s dissipating 1/8th of a watt of power in the resistor. There were apparently multiple versions of Spider House- with and without the skeleton and with 1/8th or 1/4 watt resistors. The one Random Junk had was an 1/8th of a watt, and running a resistor right at it’s power rating like that is not good. Mine has the 1/4 watt. I also noticed the raw wires where they clipped the end of the string are very close together, so them shorting out was another possibility, and an unregulated supply usually has no short-circuit protection so it would have pulled massive amounts of current through the resistor until it burned.
Grimsly Garage uses a very similar type LED plus incandescent bulb circuit, four amber LEDs with a 39R resistor, on this one the resistor is fine, but the LEDs are pulled very close to their maximum ratings- 17.9 ma with the bulb out.
Grimsly Manor: There’s been complaints online about the proprietary incandescent bulbs frequently blowing. Speculation was the bulbs were cheap Chinese junk, but given what I’ve been finding out about the unregulated power supplies, I suspected an over-voltage condition, and that’s exactly what I’ve found. When used with the stock power supply, as you can see there’s 7.2 volts thrown on the 6 volt lamps. Aggravating the problem is the frequent on-off of the blue lamp which is hard even on properly driven lamps, and that there’s no snubber capacitor on the output, which means a blown lamp could very well blow out one of the output transistors. These are extremely common 59014 and 58050 through hole switching transistors that you can get for a couple of bucks for 10 from the Chinese companies so easy to replace, but really, who is going to do that. A final complaint is that the wires leading to the sockets are hot glued where they pass through the plastic. This means that there’s not much give to the wire when you push the socket to insert a lamp, and in fact mine broke when I was playing around with it and I had to resolder it.
Newer pieces like the Kraken House they’ve switched to regulated supplies mooting the concern over overvoltages, and the newest pieces like the Mad Scientist House they have switched to USB.
Department 56 Christmas Buildings
| Name | D56 Part Number | Power Supply Type | Supply Mfg and Model Number | Rated Voltage | Measured Voltage Unloaded | Measured Voltage Loaded | Rated ma of supply | ma of piece at rated voltage |
| Christmas Lane Brite Lites Holiday House | 6003131 | Regulated Switching | 5 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 400 | 145 | |
| Christmas Lane Snowman House | 56.55390 | Regulated Switching | YouBei YB052-0300500-2A | 3 | 3.1 | 3.1 | 500 | 116 |
A few notes:
Brite Lights Holiday House has an odd voltage at 5.0 instead of 4.5m but will work just fine plugged into a 4.5 volt supply with other pieces you have, at 4.5 volts it draws 114 ma.
The Snowman House was in production an extremly long time (2005-2020) and I suspect the earlier pieces came with a different, conventional supplies rather than the YouNei switching supplies they included from the mid 2010s-to 2025
Department 56 Halloween and Christmas Accessories.
| Name | D56 Part Number | Current Draw |
| Honey Hive | 6007789 | 19 |
| Lit Ghost Billboard | 6009819 | 18 |
| Lit Graveyard Ghost | 4056707 | 16 |
| Lit Pumpkin Patch Billboard | 4057629 | 29 |
| Spooky Wrought Iron Gate | 4047599 | 17 |
| Trick or Treat Lane Entrance | 6012299 | 29 |
| Name | D56 Part Number | Current Draw |
| Boulevard Lamp Posts Lights | 56.52627 | 263 |
| Festive Christmas Gate | 6007268 | 14 |
| Uptown Street Lights | 809331 | 19 |
Lemax Halloween Pieces with Adapters
Moving on to Lemax now, we’ll start with the Halloween buildings.
| Name | Lemax Part Number | Power Supply Type | Supply Mfg and Model Number | Rated Voltage | Measured V Unloaded | Measured V Loaded | Rated ma of supply | ma of piece at rated voltage |
| Creepy Barn | 55222 | Conventional Regulated | UR4120045070G | 4.5 | 4.63 | 4.63 | 700 | 65 |
| Gothic Ruins | 65342 | Conventional Regulated | UR4120045070G | 4.5 | 4.65 | 4.65 | 700 | 100 |
And the Christmas Pieces
| Name | Lemax Part Number | Power Supply Type | Supply Mfg and Model Number | Rated Voltage | Measured V Unloaded | Measured V Loaded | Rated I of supply | I of piece at rated V |
| Skating Rink | 74254 | Switching | SJD0450550GU | 4.5 | 4.61 | 550 | 250 (150 w/o sound) |
Lemax Halloween And Christmas Pieces without Adapters
Most Lemax buildings and smaller pieces do not include adapters expecting you to use batterie or their “universal adapter”. They normally list how many millamps it will draw, I measured a few actual draws and found the ratings conservative, Conventional advise given is that the 1000 ma 4.5 volt supplies can run one motorized piece and two accessories, or two lighted houses and three accessories. These all have the 2.1 mm barrell connector, designed for 4.5 volts DC.
Halloween
| Name | Lemax Part Number | Stated Current Draw (ma) | Actual Current Draw |
| Esmeralda The Great (motor) | 14825 | 120 | 98 |
| House of Shadows | 35004 | 84 | |
| Skull and Rose Tattoo Studio | 15751 | 61 | |
| Meow Mansion | 15730 | 80 | 92 |
| Moonlander | 42 | ||
| Samantha’s Supernatural Yard Decor | 35005 | 75 | 68 |
| Spooky Hollow Pumpkin Patch | 54902 | 42 | 30 |
| Name | Lemax Part Number | Stated Current Draw | Actual Current Draw |
| Angel’s Wings (motor) | 44187 | 230 | 168 |
| Good News Day | 34088 | 16 | |
| Merry Christmas Tree (motor) | 44190 | 130 | 99 |
| Ready to Launch (motor) | 14330 | 56 |
Lemax Halloween and Christmas Accessories
Name | Lemax Part Number | Stated Current Draw | Actual Current Draw |
| Cat and Pumpkins | 24939 | 15 | 4 |
| Gothic Well | 14828 | 20 | 5 |
| Happy Halloween Ghosts | 24934 | 4 | |
| Rustic Street Lamp | 54362 | 70 | |
| Spooky Town Sign | 4710 | 30 |
| Name | Lemax Part Number | Stated Current Draw | Actual Current Draw |
| Field Lights | 44755 | 80 | 68.5 |
| Gas Lantern Street Lamps | 64498 | 75 | 56 |
The recommendation I’ve heard is for a three output adapter, you can have three lighted buildings without motors, or one motor and two accessories. In reality this is extremly conservative. There’s not a 4.5 volt piece without a motor that draws more than 100 ma so you can further split even a 550 ma adapter and power five buildings, or get a guitar pedal daisy chain cable and power up to 20 buildings with a single 2000 ma Menards power adapter.
Unloaded voltages of some generic and branded power supplies.
| Name | Part Number | Mfg | Manufacturers Part Number | Mfg Model Number | Actual Voltage |
| D56 3 Volt / 550 ma / 3 Output White | 56.55026 | Rico | RKPO-VL030550D | 3.14 | |
| D56 3 Volt / 550 ma / 3 Output Black | 4035316 | Rico | RKPO-VL030550D | 3.07 | |
| Generic 3 Volt / 1000 ma 4 Output White | Rico | RKPO-UL031000D | 3.06 | ||
| Lemax 3 Volt / 1000 ma 4 Output Black | BO30PUL | Helms-Man | SXP0301000GU | HM-323 | 3.46 |
| Lemax 4.5 Volt / 550 ma / 1 Output Black | 44402 | – | SJD0450550GU | PSP-107-AA-STD | 4.56 |
| Lemax 4.5 Volt | 94563 | SXE0451000GU | 4.50 | ||
| Menards 4.5 Volt / 2000 ma | 2794062 | Yingjiao | YS12C-0452000 | 4.52 | |
| Menards 4.5 Volt / 2000 ma | 2794062 | Ietron | DS012A0450200HV | 4.50 |
One interesting thing is the model number of the first Menards supply, I wonder if it’s actually speced at 4.52 volts.
Some general village photos
