Want info on interior Led Lites
Roger 4106
Probably gonna need to be a bit more specific on what you are looking for. Styles? Voltages? Locations? Where to buy?
That being said, I bought a bunch of LED puck lights from Menard's that I will be using throughout. I have 3 in the shower now and a couple in the bunk beds.
I got the ones without the transformer (made to extend the transformer set). They hook right up to 12 volts. Work very well. They don't put out as much light as
an incandescent, but for their intended uses, they'll work well.
craig
Google is your best bet.
Price has not come down enough for some.
I found a couple candelabra fixture type at costco, brighter and less energy than the CF that where in there. Use about 7 watts each and instant bright. I have them in the fixture that usually gets left on.
So far I find the colour of white LED's somehow unpleasing to my eye. they seem too white. Has anyone else noticed this, and are there more daylight coloured lights coming along?
I have 12v halogen in the bus now, along with fluorescent dual tube, and I'm not really satisfied with either, so still looking for the right solution!
Brian
I purchased small can light fixtures at lowe's that were fairly inexpensive that came with 50watt halogen lamps, I searched ebay and found a vendor that supplied LED lamps that would fit these fixtures. I also changed the fixture housing where they were to tall for my ceiling space by removing the connection box on the top saving about a 1 1/2" in total height. The lamp numbers on the Halogen lamps were GU 10 120volt 50 watts, the LED's were also GU 10 120 volt. They fit exactly.....! You may have to look around to find what you want.......I think they will work out just fine.........I know that the color is probably a stark white and not very warm.......but I can always find a new color they keep changing all the time. The height of the can light fixture now is 3 3/4" tall. I only paid 11 bucks for each fixture and i have 5 bucks in the LED lamp. Good luck!
Pat,
I've been looking to do exactly what you have done. I'll check out Lowes today for the fixture. What eBay vendor did you find the LED's?
Paul
Look at Lowes for under cabinet lights(led) that's where I found mine only 1 1/2 in ch thick
Not intending to hijack the thread but are they making LED driving or head lights available yet? Some new cars on tv appear to have them from the ads.
Quote from: cody on December 23, 2009, 09:17:22 AM
Not intending to hijack the thread but are they making LED driving or head lights available yet? Some new cars on tv appear to have them from the ads.
Yes, but the price is out of sight. They are 7" round and cost $400 each.
wow, in really big letters
Hi Paul, I had to go find this: http://stores.ebay.com/Hi-iQ-Telecom-Ltd (http://stores.ebay.com/Hi-iQ-Telecom-Ltd) if he doesn't have them just enter a search and use LED lamps or bulbs!
I came back here is a even better vendor at ebay he seems to have everything: http://stores.ebay.com/Trust-Deals-Lights (http://stores.ebay.com/Trust-Deals-Lights) Good luck
Quote from: cody
WOW!
hows that Cody?
Thanks Pat, I did do an ealier search on eBay and did not see anything listed except some from England. I appreciate the info!
Paul
Quote from: cody on December 23, 2009, 09:17:22 AM
Not intending to hijack the thread but are they making LED driving or head lights available yet? Some new cars on tv appear to have them from the ads.
There are a few aftermarket Aux lights available, but they are cheap ones that don't work well (mostly for bragging rights...). Truck-Lite makes the $400 7" round that belfert mentioned... The Audi R8 LED DRLs and Headlights are custom made by a company that sells to Audi directly, and the LED low/high-beam option costs $5,146.62... The LED package is the Philips-Lumileds "Altilon" LED (http://www.philipslumileds.com/products/luxeon-altilon), which is way different from most LEDs you'd find at RadioShack ;D.
Quote from: bevans6 on December 23, 2009, 05:42:54 AM...So far I find the colour of white LED's somehow unpleasing to my eye. they seem too white. Has anyone else noticed this, and are there more daylight coloured lights coming along?...
I think I mentioned this in another thread, the color of the white-light affects the light output. Most of the cheaper LED fixtures out there (I define cheap as sub-$200) give you 5200K-6500K color-temp white (this is very "cool" bluish color and not a sunlight-spectrum type output). There are "warmer" LEDs (4500K-2700K) that appear more yellowish, but as mentioned, the light output is not as good (the Color-Rendering-Index (CRI) goes up as the color-temp falls. Light output is going up on the lower color-temp LEDs, but the cost is still pretty high ($3-7 per LED) so you probably won't find them unless you go to a part supplier like Future-Electronics (http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/Search.aspx?dsNav=Ntk:PlainTextSearch%7cLumileds%7c3%7c,Ny:True,Ro:0,Nrc:id-3928,Nea:True,N:4294920255-4294900740-4294939104-916-4294924577) and "roll-your-own"...
Anyone driving across the San Mateo Bridge in the S.F. Bay Area will notice the east-bound direction is getting all of the Sodium lights replaced with LEDs - the glare is better, and you can see the lines on the road when it rains...
-Tim
Someone mentioned late this summer about LED lights in long strips. They have a warm white option. I ordered a strip to try, but the order didn't arrive before my last trip of the season. I didn't install them yet because I am thinking about some major remodeling in 2010, but may get pushed back to 2011 now.
I've a question for Tim Strommen or anyone else with a technical knowledge of LEDs - can they be damaged by too little voltage? I have a string of dirt-cheap LED lights in the loft of my house - the kind that are designed to be used as 'under counter'-type lights, powered by three 'AA' size batteries. They only have three LEDs in each fixture, but with a decent reflector behind and they do a fair job of lighting my loft. I have nine of them (total cost less than £10/$15), wired in parallel and powered by an old cell 'phone charger. The cell 'phone charger produces 3.7v, whereas the LEDs are expecting 4.5v (3x AA batteries) - but I figured there would be no problem as they were previously powered for a long time on rechargeable AA batteries which have a nominal voltage of 1.2v rather than 1.5v. The cell 'phone charger produces 350mA, but I assume this is irrelevant as the lights will presumably have internal resistors.
Five minutes ago I noticed one of the LEDs had apparently failed. I haven't investigated yet so it might just be a wiring problem, but either way I am interested to know how tolerant LEDs are to incorrect voltages.
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy,
The question about LEDs being undervolted - LEDs require a certain voltage before they begin to conduct. Once they start to conduct, the manufacturer has a current that will output light at the specified rating, which is matched to how much waste-heat the LED pachage can get rid of. if you increase the voltage to the part it will overcome the resistance of the led die a little more allowing more current to run through the diode (this generates more heat, and a little more energy is converted to light - but you may notice a color shift as the heat generated starts to build up more and more). Once the voltage gets high enough, the current starts to run-away (the resistance across the junction drops and more and more heat is generated until the LED burns either a gold wire or the LED die delaminates from the base/holder - or even more spectacularly, it superheats and melts/vaporizes... usually with a loud "pop").
Undervolting an LED will not hurt it - but that is only to a point. If you go below zero too far (reverse biasing an LED), you can do some real damage. If you have a 10x-magnification loupe or microscope, you can take a look at the LED to see if you have a bad gold bonding-wire. If not it's probable that you have a bad connection somewhere. One thing to note, the charger if it is really old, may have a current limiting function built in that raises the voltage until the load draws a specified current - in most cases now, the phone or laptop has the final charge regulation circuits, so the "wall-wart" may not be as tightly regulated...
Lastly, you mentioned "dirt cheap" and "battery-powered" - these two things suggest to me that you will want to open one of the dead fixtures to see how they acually wired the LEDs up. I suspect they might not have a resistor for current regulation - but instead rely on the output characteristics of the AA batteries for voltage/current regulation... In this case, by hooking the fixture up to a high-power supply (relative to the AAs), you may have exceeded the current capability of the LEDs (350mA is far higher than most 20mA LEDs will take).
Best of luck in doing the failure analysis...
-Tim
Can't I put a "cream colored" shade over my led's to make the temp warmer? Best case.....50% of the light?
Thanks,
John
Removed
OK....OK,
I did say "shade". And lamp shade does come to mind. At least now it does. :P
What I meant was that my "stock" RV fixtures have a plastic "cover" that makes the stark light from the tungsten bulbs very nice or diffused. Couldn't I treat those LEDs the same way and even in the same fixture? I know a diffusing cover/shade saps candle power to do its job and I don't know if having a completely different temp would work as well. That 3 to 6 dollar apeace cost for the "warm temp" LED leaves me cold.
And Big D: No I am not going to glue a lot of'em together and take them to the beach and use'em to block the sun. SSSSSHHHHEEEEEEEHHHH Ya gotta be sooo kerfull with some folks....LOL "D"....LOL
Thanks for catching that,
John
Quote from: JohnEd on December 25, 2009, 12:22:51 PM...Can't I put a "cream colored" shade over my led's to make the temp warmer? Best case.....50% of the light?...
Yes, you can use a filter over the LED, but...
While light is generally additive when applied to an environment, a filter or shade is a color subtractor. Generally if you want to get a certain color of light - you need to have enough light in the color spectrum that you want generated by the lamp you are using that when you filter out the parts that you do not want, you end up with the desired light spectrum. LEDs are not really broad spectrum emitters like say halogen filaments. There isn't that much light generated that isn't in the target spectrum (there are peaks in the blue/red wavelengths and a "hump" from the green through the yellow spectrum - but it isn't as close to a slope as Halogen or sun-light. This means that if you filter out the blue and red (retaining a yellowing cast to the light) to lower the color temperature, you may be reducing the light output by as much as 70%...
That leaves you with about 30% of the original output to use, and doesn't take into account the losses from the lenses and reflectors (they are never "perfect", and always have at least 3% loss for each element...).
It's often better to get the LED you want rather than fix it on the back-end if possible.
-Tim
Tim,
Excellent! Thank you. I now remember, thanks to you, a post that advocated mixing in yellow and red LED's to "adjust the temp of the light. Does that seem like it would work? I also read, here recently I think, that the color adjusted LED's that mimicked sunlight were VERY expensive. I would welcome your comments.
Thanks,
John
Quote from: JohnEd on December 27, 2009, 06:22:34 PM...I now remember a post that advocated mixing in yellow and red LED's to "adjust the temp of the light. Does that seem like it would work? I also read, here recently I think, that the color adjusted LED's that mimicked sunlight were VERY expensive...
Hi John,
Adding a few Yellow or Amber LEDs will add color in the areas that are a bit weak with the "cooler" LEDs.
This is a grab from a Philips-Lumileds Rebel White Data sheet (which can be found here (http://www.philipslumileds.com/pdfs/DS63.pdf)).
(https://busconversionmagazine.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi1021.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Faf333%2Ftim292stro%2FWhiteSpectrums.png&hash=51ea2ae7121a947ff42308234855c54fb14b2492)
This image shows the spectrums for three general color-temperatures of white, 6500K which is very blue/cool, 4000K which is typically called "neutral", and 3000K which is generally pretty red-ish/warm.
If you take a look at Wikepedia, you'll see this is the spread for light wavelengths (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light)...
Violet = 380-450nM
Blue = 450-495nM
Green = 495-590nM
Yellow = 590-620nM
Red = 620-750nM
I think it's usefull to see the difference in the contents of the light that is emited in order to know what you want to change. So, here are the same three spectrums overlayed on eachother:
(https://busconversionmagazine.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi1021.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Faf333%2Ftim292stro%2FWhiteSpectrumsOverlayed.png&hash=b409afc01f027abf8cf4ab7fdc81d490d9f14b9a)
You will note that generally the blue content is pretty similar - this is due to the use of a Blue LED which also emits a little UV that excites the Phosphor-Slurry that Lumileds applies to their die (this phosphor is a tuned mix of different phosphors that look like white when viewed over a general area). You'll note that for the 6500K LED, the most output of light is in the Blue and Green spaces, while for the 3000K LED they have increased the relative presence of Green, Yellow, and Red-ish Orange.
I know it's a bit long winded to go into this description, but I figure we're about learning here and people should know "why" it works...
So to put your answer simply, yes, you can add yellow LEDs to an already 6500K LED lamp and get a warmer-white color - you shouldn't need to add more green as our eyes are already picking up enough green ;). If you want the 6500K LED to appear even warmer, you can use Amber or a mix of White, Yellow, Amber, and Red-ish Orange to move it even warmer (down to 2700K, about the warmth of a candle's color which is actually around 1800K).
If you want to adjust the color temperature dyynamically, you can put the different LED colors on separate "channels" of PWM dimming and adjust the brightness of each channel to get the target. This is how they are doing sunset effects for ceiling washes these days - start with a cool 6500K white to simulate noon, then slowly add yellow, then amber, then red-ish orange, then dim out the White, then yellow, then amber, then dim out the red-ish orange to simulate night-time ("dark" implies night... Right? ;) ).
Hope this helps...
-Tim
Non-Compensation Statement: Philips-Lumileds does not compensate me to mention them nor am I an employee, they are simply my LED manufacturer of choice (and have been for some ten years or so). Link to the datasheet was obtained through their public website and the data provided in the datasheet is compiled by Philips-Lumileds, so if you have spotted something wrong with their data... it's their problem ;D. -T
Tim,
That is a superb response. :o You answered questions I wasn't knowledgeable enuf to assemble and that certainly expedites the learning process...for me. I "think" I have a concept for what would be the be-all end-all lighting system for me. And it is a brand new thought.
The LED seems to be the most efficient light source possible and the prices for the individual lamps seems to be dropping dramatically....exactly what I need. From an efficiency standpoint there seems to not be any down side in the least. Seems instead to be strong motive to convert all lights to this technology. I have reading lights, baby spots, that are intense but being Tungsten are more yellowish/orange. They are very comfortable but still I prefer my flo tubes that are cooler for reading a lot. For work I use overhead lights and that light is intense and very cool. It is used for cleaning and such and it is never left on for long periods. I have other low intensity lights that I use for ambient or background lighting. So that makes three or four types of lighting that I use. They overlap very little due to their relative intensity and color. If I could adjust the general intensity of each and the color or each, as well, I could overlap the applications of each fixture and undoubtedly the comfort of my environment. Lasts forever and uses no power AND creates no heat for my AC to deal with. Where is the down side?
It has been mentioned on the board, Boogie the Cat I think, that there are new LEDs that are super bright but they are very expensive. I can gang enuf lights for intensity, I think, to achieve my goals. Sounds like a great project to me. I hope we can get together and explore this further.
Thank you,
John