Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased two of these trees to go aside our front door. The extra parts provided are a few of the flexible PVC flowers that go at the end of each branch. These reflect the light and help to illuminate the tree. The instructions state that you should not bend any branch more than 5 times as it might weaken the connection and the lights won’t light. Out of the box I had one branch on one of the trees that did not light. I eventually was able to bend it in a way that the lights lit, but I am going to return the tree and request a replacement because I believe that the branch is very weak and that it may lose it’s connection at any time. With this same tree I also had a problem putting together the two pieces of the tree trunk. If you scroll down on the Amazon photo and zoom into the connection you can see the two screws that hold the whole thing together. They each screw into a small nut on each side, but the outer pipe is so thin that the screw hardly screws into the outer pipe at all before it hits the second pipe that has been slipped inside. The nuts are barely attached to the outer pipe and one fell off as I was trying to screw in the screw. I had to use electrical tape to wrap the screw and nut into place and then wrap around the truck to the other side to hold the two pieces of the trunk together. I only had black electrical tape on hand, so in the daylight it looks pretty bad. The connection is not at all sturdy. The description states: “Stable base of cross iron pipe stand.” The base is not iron pipe. It is a light-weight plastic.. It is the trunk of the tree that is a pipe, but it is a very thin pipe and the two pieces of the trunk are weakly connected. Lastly the electric cord is the thinnest cord I have ever seen. I have my trees standing on our front porch and I’ve put four bricks around each tree stand to hold it into place. The tree is much less sturdy than I expected, but I do like the way it lights up our entrance. I am hoping that if I don’t reconfigure the branches, trees will last the promised 3000 hours. UPDATE: In 2015 one branch on each tree was dark. You couldn't really tell by looking at it, so it didn't bother me much. This season, one tree is completely dark, so now what do I do? When I put it up, I could see it blink on and off and I thought I was able to tape the weak link so that it would say on. But last night, the whole tree was dark again, and I can't find the broken area to get it to light. I'm very disappointed.