LEDs Etc

Prudent RVer at the Gypsy Rally in Yuma

The week of March 5 is time for the Gypsy Rally at the Fairgrounds in Yuma, AZ. Alice and I will be manning a booth in the market, and I will be giving a seminar on LEDs in RVs. This has always been a fun rally to attend, and I expect to be fun again.

In the meantime, Nancy the LED Lady will be running the booth at the Arizona Market Place at 4th Ave and 32nd Street. If you are in the area, stop by for a visit and see out latest products.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

PS, I will be autographing and selling my new book, Was a Time When, at the rally. You can read about it at www.WasATimeWhen.com and purchase it on Amazon as a printed book or Kindle book.

LEDs and RF Interference

I notice there has been a lot of traffic on this blog about the RF problem with some LED products, where a hearing-aide or a TV or a radio has problems when the LEDs are turned on.

First, LEDs do not produce the radio frequency interference. An LED is simply a diode that emits light when a DC current is run through it. There is no complex circuitry within an LED to create the radio waves.

Second, the power source generating the voltage to run into the diode is what can produce the radio frequency interference. It all depends upon the design of the circuit around the LED chip. Some inexperienced design engineers are taking a simple, cheap approach to providing power to the LED, and their products create the RF interference.

So if someone says to you, "All LEDs generate RF, tell that person he/she does not know what they are talking about. Only LED devices with poorly designed power circuitry have that problem."

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer at www.prudentrver.com
and the author at www.WasATimeWhen.com

Combos, the Latest in Configurable LED Lights for RVs

PrudentRVer.com has combined the flexibility of the zipLED with the ZDisk of the W9.RV3N products into an even newer more flexible product. We call them "Combos."

PrudentRVer.com began selling zipLED products three years ago. These allow the customer to use different light bases to fit the variety of lightbulb sockets in an RV and connect various lightsticks to those bases to solve lighting problems.

Last year we introduced the least expensive solution on the Internet for replacement of the 921 bulb in RVs. This product incorporated the 6 and 10 LED chip designs of the RV2N and RV3N ZDisks.

This summer, at the Escapade in Gillette, WY, Nancy Lessor-Adamo, the LED Lady, began to experiement with how to attach the ZDisk to a zipLED base and created two new products, the B15.ZD6 and the B15.ZD10. She called these products the "Combos." You can see them at www.PrudentRVer.com.

This combination of technologies allows us to provide 200 lumens of light in a flexible solution to fill B15s and B15d sockets in 12volt systems. The voltage regulation features of the ZDisks provide an even better LED product for your RV or boat. Give it a try.

sam

Whither RV LEDs

LED lighting for RVs is a very small niche market. There are not many RVs (compared to homes and businesses) and the primary selling point is to replace existing light bulbs with something better.

The prudentrver.com has worked with Neutek over the past five years to find the best implementation for RV bulb replacements and to find the best kind of light for RVers. We believe we have done a very credible job and have a product line that many are happy with.

Unfortunately, we are a flea on the end of a dog's tail and are being tossed around like a piece of flotsam in the ocean. There are many who have looked at our product and "knocked" it off, making replications at a cheaper price. Unfortunately, they most often did not understand the fine points of the technology and so miss the mark on product quality, and they do not understand the fine points of the kind of light people in RVs want and need. It is not the blue-white lite that is so easy to make with LEDs, it is a high-CR natural warm white that works in that environment.

At this time we are making re-orders for product we have qualified and purchased in the past, but our suppliers in China (the only source) have upped the minimum order quantity by a factor of 10. Our business is growing, but not that fast. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I am not sure how it will all work out. We are in negotiations and hope to find some way of surviving and still providing what we believe is the best LED lighting out there, but there is the danger that we may not survive. For those who care, just wanted to let you know we are doing our best.

sam, the Prudent RVer

Powering LEDs With AC

I am working on a couple of articles on installing LEDs in an AC (Alternating Current) environment, you know, the 120VAC we find in most domestic homes. The biggest push in the industry is to design LED lamps that work well in that market. The 12VDC market of the RVs is really small potatoes.

LEDs are intrinsically DC devices. They are diodes that want the current to flow in only one direction. To use them efficiently in an AC environment requires specialized circuits.

The problem all started with Thomas Edison. He wanted the electrical grid of the USA to be an AC grid and make use of the generators and such he had invented. Tesla wanted a DC grid, but he lost out. Now we have all our home filled with AC power, and the fixtures are designed to work in that environment.

The simple incandescent light bulb (a 60W for example) has an "Edison" base. This is a screw-in and the usual size is 27mm in diameter. The ground line is connected to the socket surrounding the base, and the power is applied to the contact at the bottom of the base. That electrical power supplies the full 120VAC current to the filament inside the bulb. The flow of current causes the filament to heat up to white hot and emit light.

The 60W incandescent bulb emits about 840 lumens of white light. This much light is required because all the light is coming from a single source, and it must be strong enough to fill a large room space.

In an RV the lights run on 12VDC. There are multiple light bulbs, each of which emits in the range of 150 to 250 lumens. Since these are placed throughout the ceiling and walls of the RV, there is no single source of light. Rather, the light is spread out and each source does not have to be so bright as with a 60W bulb.

We have had very good results if we use linear LED lighting in an RV. This spreads the source of the light even more, and makes for good indirect lighting.

So my forthcoming articles will discuss the pros and cons of using AC power for LED lamps. It can be done, but it tends to be more expensive. But it is very hard to convince people to look for a lighting method that does not use the old-style Edison-base bulbs they always have had.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

An LED Solution for Rigs With Too Much Lighting

The fifth-wheel RV that I use at my basecamp has sixteen 12-volt fluorescent fixtures, each containing two F15T8 tubes. Each fixture uses 30 watts (2.2 amps) of 12-volt power to produce an effective 1,100 lumens of white fluorescent light.

If all fixtures are turned ON at the same time, the wattage is 480 watts (40 amps) and produces a rated luminosity of 27,480 lumens. But because of the limited light efficiency of fluorescent fixtures, the fluorescents only provide an effective 17,600 lumens (1,100 lumens each).

Oh yes, since the electrical efficiency of the ballast and lights is only about 50%, they are pumping 240 of those watts into heating the air in my rig.

In my humble opinion, that is just too much lighting (and heating) for an RV, even a large one with 400 sq-ft of space.

My sixteen fluorescent fixtures are grouped into four sets of three each and four singles. By turning OFF two of the three fixtures in each group, we could reduce our consumption to 240 watts (20 amps), and still have an effective luminosity of 8,800 lumens. That helps, but the resultant lighting is lumpy: too bright in some sections and dim in other parts of the rig.

So that is still too much lighting for some of the space we live in, and too little elsewhere. The obvious solution is to switch to LEDs to replace the fluorescent -- and that is what I did.

When I switched to LEDs, I intentionally reduced the amount of light from each fixture by disconnecting the ballasts and installing a single MyT.fLED-12 LightStrip in each fixture. Each fixture now provides an effective 480 lumens of light each, so the total lighting is 7,680, nearly what I could get by turning off eight of the fluorescent fixtures. And the light is constant throughout the rig, just as we want it. At the same time I reduced the electrical load for lighting from 480 to 96 watts, (40 amps to 8 amps).

As an added bonus, on warm summer evenings I no longer have to use nearly 750 watts to power the air conditioner to remove the excess heat produced by the fluorescent fixtures with their inefficiencies. That can easily add up to an additional 3kwhr per evening, so I am saving 4.2kwhr per evening.

At a retail cost of $37.20 each, the cost of converting all sixteen fluorescent fixtures is less than $550 with the 10% quantity discount. I get better light without heat or fluorescent radio interference or having to replace fluorescent tubes. And it takes about 5 minutes to convert a fixture. LEDs are a win-win solution.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

MyT.fLEDescents Compared to Stock Fluorescents

We recently moved into a Teton 5th-wheel at our basecamp. We found we had inherited 14 fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling, each containing two F15T8 tubes. Each fixture used 30watts of power to produce an effective output of 1,100 lumens of light.

If we turned on all the lights at the same time, we produced 15,400 lumens of bright white light along with using 4.2Kilowatts per hour. At the current price middle of August of nearly 20cents per kwhr, that came to $0.84 per hour. But at least half of that was wasted in heat, and it took three times as much power to get that extra heat out of the rig ($1.26), so our real cost for all that light was $2.10 per hour!

If this seems to be crazy, it is. First, we would not usually want all that light. So we could turn off some of the light fixtures. That would save some of the power consumption. But when I look around me, I still see 9 of the fixtures turned ON. Then I notice that those fixtures producing the light are all focused on specific areas, and the light is not spread out evenly the way I would want it.

A better solution is to reduce the amount of light coming from each fixture. But with fluorescents, you must power both tubes, and both will be using energy.

I made the remarkable decision that I should replace some of the fluorescent lighting with LED lighting using our MyT.fLEDescent product.

My first attempt was to put a single 12inch strip of MyT.TL2R light strip into a fixture to replace the two F15T8 tubes. The lumen rating of this light strip is 480 lumens, but at least it is all directed downward into the room. I was amazed when I found that the amount of light provided from each fixture was quite sufficient. The rig had been over-lit.

Each of the lightstrips uses 5watts of power (only 17% of the power required by the fluorescents) for the same fixture, and the power used to generate heat is less than 15% of that total. So the heat that must be exhausted by the air conditioning requires less than 3% of the total power usage. Suddenly, our power consumption with all lights ON dropped from $2.10 per hour to $0.15 per hour (for 0.75kilowatts).

The result is that I could be looking at as much as a 93% reduction in the operational cost of my lighting. Now is the time to charge forward and replace all the lights with LEDs.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

 

Thoughts on LED Futures

I got started in LED lighting nearly five and a half years ago when I went looking for a way to help my batteries survive on cloudy days when my solar system could not keep up with the burn rate of the incandescent lights in my fifth-wheel. We were camped on the desert in Quartzsite at the time, so I went into the Big Tent for ideas on how to build some useful LED lights.

In 2006 there were a few LED lights that could connect with the fixtures in an RV, but their quality was poor, they failed quickly, and the light produced was not sufficient to be useful. The best being offered were built using LEDs designed for flashlights. In some cases they required direct wiring into the electrical system of the RV.

One booth at Q that I walked into had LEDs all over the place. Flashlights, dog collars, antennas, badges, beacons, and some of the strangest looking jim-kracky items you could imagine. I saw nothing that looked like it solved my problem, and I was about to leave. Then on the back table I saw a device that looked similar to an incandescent light from my RV.

Its form-factor was much like the 1141 bulb in my patio light, with a small metal base with two ears and a single contact. Sticking out the top of the metal can was a post surrounded with nine bare semiconductor chips, each a pale yellow color and about 3mm square. I had retired from a computer board manufacturer associated with Silicon Valley and knew the value of surface mount devices.

I asked the salesman, "Is that a light? Does it work?"

"Sure, let me show you." He brought over a couple of leads from a nearby 12v battery and touched them to the case and bottom contact. The device lit up brighter than my 1141. It was awesome.

"How much does that one cost?"

"This is the prototype. If there is enough interest they could sell for about $35, but they will last for 100,000 hours. And they only draw about 20% of the amps used by the incandescent. But you should talk to Kelly. He is the one who designed it."

I met Kelly, the owner of Neutek in Mesa, AZ, and that evening we designed a replacement for the 921 bulbs used in the ceiling fixtures of my rig. I agreed to buy eleven of them. After a bit more talk, I agreed to sell his products at rallies on the west coast. That was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between PrudentRVer.com and Neutek. We collaborated on the design of other LED solutions for RVs, and the Far East has "knocked off" our designs several times. I am now the stocking distributor for Neutek.

The reason for this history lesson is that I just realized it has only been five and a half years from the start of this "small segment of industry." It has changed so much, and there are so many more changes coming.

First, people commented on the high cost of LEDs, and yet they bought them to save on power and reduce heat in their rig. They could see the advantage, and they appreciated our policy of always backing up our product for its full life. Now, five and a half years later, the price has dropped over 50%. It is still a bit expensive, but people are replacing ALL the incandescents in their RVs, not just one or two. For some rigs this is 25 or more bulbs and the cost can be less than $400.

One of the big changes PrudentRVer.com in concerned with is the move to fully regulated light stripes, our TL2R. Each inch of the strip provides 40 lumens of natural white light (480 lumens per foot) and each inch is protected by a set of regulators that protect against the vagaries of voltage fluctuations found in most RVs (like when you turn on the generator, or the solar panels kick in). This is part of Neutek's ThinLUX linear lighting product set. We have solutions for RVs, boats, and domestic homes.

Another big change is the coming introduction of really nice 120v AC "bulbs" to go into the existing domestic home fixtures. We are not selling these, but we do strongly recommend them. They are a major step beyond incandescents, and so much better than the squirrel-tailed CFLs (that are actually a hazardous waste).

The result of these changes will be the ubiquitous replacement of incandescents and fluorescents with LEDs. It seems to be taking a long time, but then five and a half years ago, we were starting from nearly zero, and look how far we have come.

Go green. Go LEDs.

Sam Penny,  the Prudent RVer

 

Question about LEDs on Boats

Today I got this request from R, a boater:

Greetings, Sam

I have been looking at your website a good deal lately.  I am in the process of a total refit of an old sailboat I have in Southern California.  One of the things I will be doing soon is adding LED lighting as the main interior source of light.  I am bouncing between the strip LEDs and converting a typical RV fixture to LED.  The real issue boils down to locating a good fixture to convert at a reasonable price or simply using a strip.  Based on what I see on your website, the angle of illumination is 150 degrees in both cases.  Do I have that right?  Your recommendation or advice would be very much appreciated.  In most cases, the lighting will be overhead (in the galley, over the dinette area, in the head/shower compartment, etc.) with a low headroom of around 6' 2-4".  Wide angle lighting is needed.  I would also like to have some red night lighting for night sailing in order not to impact night vision for the crew coming below for a snack or a look at the chart before returning to the cockpit.

If you know of a good source for RV/boat fixtures that would take the appropriate LEDs you sell, please advise and I will take a look at the units online or in some RV supply houses.

Your website is a good source of information.  Thanks for being there.

Regards, R

 

[Smile] It is always nice to have someone compliment your website. Glad it is helpful.

My response to R:

Congrats on your going to LEDs. Let's see how well I cover your questions.

First I will discuss the angle of illumination. We use SMD chips in which the LED emitter is embedded a small distance behind a phosphor coating that covers the surface of the chip. The LED light comes out smoothly in a cone that is about 150 degrees wide, sort of like a flood lamp. It is not a de-focused beam but rather a spread of light. The reason light does not come out the side is that the side-edge of the SMD chip gets in the way. Overhead lighting in your boat would not shine into the upper corners of the ceiling, but put most of the light within eye level across the room. It does work well for us in an RV since most of what we want to see is on the surface of the table or the book we are reading.

That said, we are experimenting with a new fixture called a DL100 (DownLight - 1000 lumens/ft). It is a linear light using our TL2R strips inside a special diffuser (Take a look at the MyT.fLED-C product for some comparisons). It looks sort of like half a fluorescent tube, with a metal plate that attaches to the ceiling (I used velcro). The diffuser spreads the light some more, and therefore the side light is brighter than if you were viewing the LED chips directly. Of course, this is at the expense of some of the light that would have gone down if it had not been redirected. I expect to have the product up on the website in the next couple of weeks, and its cost will be $4.25/inch. So a 10" DL100 offering 800 lumens would retail at $42.50. This is less than some 12-inch ThinLites fixtures. Of course, the ThinLite has a switch - the DL100 does also, but it is a special ON/OFF/dimmer switch at a $35 premium.

You can also attach a plain old lightstrip to the ceiling, either bare or in a plastic, waterproof tube. You still have the need for a switch somewhere. Without a diffuser, you will have points of light that bothers some people.

For the head/shower compartment, you might want to consider putting tubed lightstrips running vertically on the walls, like next to the mirror. This will get the light both up and down where you need it. I would not put a fluorescent type fixture there -- it is a waste of space.

For red light, I propose you determine how much light you want then purchase segments of the ThinLUX.TL0 in the native red color. For comparison, a single 1141 type bulb will provide an effective 140 lumens in a ceiling fixture. The TL0 is 10 lumens/inch, but you can run two or three strips side by side to get a concentration of light. The length would depend on the cockpit configuration. TL0 can be encased in waterproof tubing which is probably a requirement in the cockpit area.

As far as suggesting fixtures, I really don't have a good suggestion. Most of the ceiling down lights for RVs and boats are cans that you embed in the ceiling, and these all produce points of light. I like linear lighting, either with a diffuser like in the DL100 or as LightStrips like our SL1 or TL2R.

Thanks for the good words on the use of the website. Always feels good to be of use to someone. If you have more questions, please send email to sam@prudentrver.com or call me at 512-632-4626.

Regards,
Sam Penny
the Prudent RVer

Question about LEDs in Signs

Earlier this week I received an email question from M about using LEDs in signs. Paraphrasing what M said:

My sign company is in the process of testing some LED systems in our signs.  The signs are  14"  length  x 3.5" tall x 3" deep, and the actual light up area is 10 inches x 3 inches.  We currently use two 7 watt bulbs for a total of 14 watts. The brightness is ok but I would like them to be a tad bit brighter than the 14 watt bulbs. What do you suggest as far as backlighting? and how many? I am considering your ZLS LightStick and the ThinLUX.SL1.

For the ZLS you mention that the LightStick must be thermally attached to 12 sq-in of metal for proper operation. What does that mean?

Would these work for my needs, or are these LEDs only for use in vehicles?

Thanks, M

I responded: Let me begin by telling you about our latest addition on the www.prudentrver.com website. It is best described by the MyT.fLED-C product you can find on the website. The basic component is our flexible, half-inch wide TL2R tapelight which has 6 LED chips per inch. The light output is 40 lumens per inch, using 1/2 watt/inch of power. It can be provided in custom lengths from 1 inch up to 5 meters. The light from each segment is spread out over a 1/2 by 1 inch surface, and this gives a smoother appearance behind a lens cover, or in your case, a sign.

The TL2R product contains two proprietary voltage regulators per inch that provide an operating range of 11 to 18-volts (most efficiently at 12.5 volts). It does not require a special heat-sink, though it is good to have some way for the small amount of heat generated to escape. The tape is flexible with double stick glue on back. There is a TL2 version without regulation that is a bit cheaper but it requires a regulated 12-volt source of power.

The Starion chips were designed to produce a very bright LED light, but they do so by generating an excess of heat -- thus the requirement of a good heat-sink to back them up. Also, they are very bright points of light, which I would think could be a problem in your sign. The SL1 is a lightstrip using our more proven HyBright.3 LED chips, each producing about 20 lumens. Both of these products have operating voltage ranges of 11 to 13.8 volts and so should be driven by regulated 12-volt power.

I personally am recommending use of the new TL2R in many of our current applications. It offers a brighter light over a wider area without the overheating problems of the older generation LEDs. It also comes in Pure White, Natural White, and Warm White.

You ask about working only in vehicles. We originally designed our LEDs as the replacement of incandescent bulbs in RVs and boats that have a native 12-volt DC power source. However, our LED products are quite usable in industrial or domestic house environments by using one of the many 120VAC/12VDC converters that are available. For your sign application, a group of several signs could be handled quite easily with a single wall-plug mounted supply. It is a matter of running something like 22 gauge speaker wire from the power source to the various signs. I can help you find a good power source if you wish.

I hope this has answered your questions. If you have more, please call me at 512-632-4626 and we can discuss your requirements in more detail. You can also email me directly at sam@prudentrver.com

Regards,
Sam Penny
the Prudent RVer