At 01:17 PM 5/2/2003, you wrote: >I, for one, hate fluorescent lighting and cannot bring myself to install >it in my Vanagon despite any energy savings. Has anyone looked into a >LED solution? Something LED based should be full-spectrum, energy >saving, and non-"strobe" based. Seems like there would be a great LED >solution out there somewhere. > >\/\/i!!y If you hate fluorescent lighting because of the flicker/strobe thing, you shouldn't have any problem with DC powered lights. The strobe effect is because of the 60 cycle/second (in USA) frequency of our AC electricity. DC powered fluorescents generally use a switching power supply that operates at 25,000+ cycles/second. No visible strobing at all! If you hate them because of the poor color rendering, look for replacement tubes made with the newer tri-phosphor blends. The older halophosphate coatings usually have poor color rendering, with CRI's (Color Rendering Index) of less than 70. Newer blends can have CRI in the 80's or 90's. A CRI of 100 is "perfect", rendering all colors across the visible spectrum as well as daylight. I ran across some 12Volt fluorescent drop lights at Kragen auto. They have a small U-shaped tube, draw about 0.85 Amps on 12 volts, are amazingly bright, and seem to have a *very* good CRI. I gutted the old incandescent fixture in my westy and stuffed the tube and power circuitry from the fluorescent drop light light into it... MUCH more efficient than the old fixture (which drew 2.25 amps!) and great light output, both in quantity and in color. LEDs can make a nice "point source" light for reading or localized tasks, but it's not easy to provide good bright general lighting with them. It takes a LOT of them to cover a lot of area well. The color of the white LEDs tends towards the same bluish white color as older cool white fluorescents, with very poor color rendering of reds. And white LED's aren't very efficient. For efficiency, fluorescent is still way ahead of LED's in most any color except red. Red is the *most* efficient color for LED, and the *least* efficient color for fluorescent... For white light, fluorescent still wins hands down over LED's for lumens/watt by quite a large margin. Steve '86 Westy |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.