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  History of SprinkLites™ by Gary Hartz                           TO ORDER Call 877-718-2477 for a Dealer Near You.

Trouble shooting and Solving Problems for a career, SprinkLites^(TM) is what you get when you have a retired engineer playing around in the garden. When I reworked the front entry and lined the walk with a series of potted plants. It looked great; but then the problems started.

First the pots blocked the spray from the sprinklers. The solution was to install a series of drip heads. Well now the potted plants were ok, but, the spaces between didn’t get enough water. I played with sprayers, but, they all sprayed out, I had too heat and bend the supports to get the spray where I wanted. The hardware chain Home Base started to close their local store and when the price was right, I purchased some brass lawn ornaments. I stuck them in the ground, wrapped the tubing for my drip system around the support and attached the sprayers to the sculptures pointing down. Everything worked great, neighbors asked, where they could buy the sprinklers and damage from the mailman stopped, because, he could now see the sprinkler supports.

Thinking about using bulky fixtures for lighting the pathway would go back to blocking the spray and adding clutter. I came up with the Idea of lighting the sculptures, I checked into fiber optics, but was blown away with the expense and energy consumption. Someone suggested Light Emitting Diodes, I made some models out of clay, then molds and cast my critters in a clear polymer resin. When I installed the LED into the sculpture I was amazed at the effect and SprinkLites™ were born.

Initial marketing efforts resulted in a company that wanted an exclusive license, making the lights in China. The first set of prototypes missed the concept completely, then other problems popped up with the licensor. I was put into direct contact with the factory and we set about to complete the intended design.

The illumination concept goes against all existing lighting conventions making it difficult to overcome the engineering objections. When we were close to completion having solved some production issues they went back to an earlier version and assembled the guts upside down. When I asked what happened, the factory quit the project. Knowing how to make contact, I set about looking for a new manufacturer. I selected two and compared their abilities, finally selecting the company with the best progress and communication. I had developed a very good rapport with a Taiwanese rep, but he was unable to overcome Internal company squabbles that sent the product into oblivion. Anticipating problems he selected a backup company and we started over.

Same problems with the lighting concept, It wont work. The effect will kill the light, that is wrong. Well again it took almost a year to overcome all the objections. They almost quit, but, my rep brought them back in, then size became an issue. I made a trip to China in January, the factory just finished polishing the Hummingbird sculpture on the morning of my afternoon visit. They finally did it my way and were amazed with the results, the owner kept getting up and going over to play with the LED and the sculpture. He would come back to the table all smiles and thumbs up, apologies flowed like water. Immediately the situation changed, the butterfly was ready in 2 days and we picked up an unpolished Dragonfly on the way to the Airport. A commitment was made to start the tooling, Its April 2007, and we are ready for production. Order your Collectable Limited Edition set now!

                    September 2007 Finally SprinkLites™ are here.

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