Date:         Fri, 2 May 2003 17:35:15 -0700
Reply-To:     laurasdog@WEIRDSTUFFWEMAKE.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Steve Delanty <laurasdog@WEIRDSTUFFWEMAKE.COM>
Subject:      Re: Interior Lights
In-Reply-To:  <000c01c310e7$dc6a7540$0a01a8c0@UWIHQ.com>
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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