Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ranch

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JR.
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

Post by JR. »

It's good to know that T5 is 9% more efficient than T8 but if I were to invest in a new fixture i probably wouldn't buy fluorescent at all.

I fired up my rube goldberg 4x LED lamps in a cheap vanity fixture and my initial reaction is not very enthusiastic. Certainly not a great work area light.

This weekend I will swap out the ballast in one fluorescent fixture and see how the two fixtures compare to each other for heat output. I may follow up with a second new ballast, if results seem significant (only $20).

JR
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mediatechnology
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

Post by mediatechnology »

Vanities and closets are the only place I use CFLs. Closets because they are used so infrequently and vanities due to light output.

The Pink Ranch's main hall bathroom fixture only has two sockets. They were originally the small base 60W which is a trick the manufacturer used to get around the upcoming 60W ban on A-series. The candelabra style were exempt. I switched bases back to Edison so it could use A-series replacements. There might now be a "75-100W" range LED equivalent using two of them that is non-directional enough to work. I saw a press release of a "75W" clone of the GE 62180 recently.

The problem with many of the lower-cost LED replacements is that most of the light output goes out the ends and "top" hemisphere. Since vanities are almost always side-firing you may have a lot of light hitting the walls and very little to see yourself in the mirror with. Are your 40W LEDs "snow cones?"

I bet however with 4X of the GE 62180 you could get enough light since its almost omni-directional. Four of those in a bedroom ceiling fixture produce a lot of light. The 3000 deg K color temp of the GE just seem to produce more usable output than the same wattage Philips 2700 deg K. If you're looking for that Thomas Kincade yellow light look for warmth the Philips are very pleasing but I didn't like it when I tried it in the Vanity.

4X of the GE 62180 look about like two 75W soft white incandescents.
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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mediatechnology wrote:Vanities and closets are the only place I use CFLs. Closets because they are used so infrequently and vanities due to light output.

The Pink Ranch's main hall bathroom fixture only has two sockets. They were originally the small base 60W which is a trick the manufacturer used to get around the upcoming 60W ban on A-series. The candelabra style were exempt. I switched bases back to Edison so it could use A-series replacements. There might now be a "75-100W" range LED equivalent using two of them that is non-directional enough to work. I saw a press release of a "75W" clone of the GE 62180 recently.
the 40w equivalent GE 62180 is more like $30 so 3x the cost of my <$10 sno-cones.

The problem with many of the lower-cost LED replacements is that most of the light output goes out the ends and "top" hemisphere. Since vanities are almost always side-firing you may have a lot of light hitting the walls and very little to see yourself in the mirror with. Are your 40W LEDs "snow cones?"
yup...

I may try one more time with them mounted higher pointing down, but the light output is just so muck less than the old school fluorescent fixture.

[edit] I just took a quick look with a longer line cord on this, and firing straight down from above it is not bad, not as much light as fluorescent but cheap LED bulbs work firing down from above ... Not sure I want to screw a fixture into my ceiling, but I may try hanging it from the same rig, my florescent is now hanging from 7' above floor level. [/edit]

This is not a primary work area, and only used as a shipping area so I don't need great light, but good light is just nice, and for not many hours per week, not a huge energy/heat concern.

I am still looking for a better light for my work bench so maybe new T5 fluorescent isn't out of the question. Could be 20% better than my 30 YO T8
I bet however with 4X of the GE 62180 you could get enough light since its almost omni-directional. Four of those in a bedroom ceiling fixture produce a lot of light. The 3000 deg K color temp of the GE just seem to produce more usable output than the same wattage Philips 2700 deg K. If you're looking for that Thomas Kincade yellow light look for warmth the Philips are very pleasing but I didn't like it when I tried it in the Vanity.

4X of the GE 62180 look about like two 75W soft white incandescents.
Not ready to drop $120 on light bulbs... Did I mention I'm cheaper than I'm green.

JR

PS: There's a commercial running in current rotation about some lady who owns a Volt and is talking about how she's taking the money she saves from not buying gas for a trip to Hawaii... ARE CONSUMERS SO IGNORANT THAT THEY DON'T REALIZE THE PURCHASE COST OF THE VEHICLE MATTERS? She could have bought a cheaper car, run it on gas, and gone to Hawaii twice.
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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There's a commercial running in current rotation about some lady who owns a Volt and is talking about how she's taking the money she saves from not buying gas for a trip to Hawaii... ARE CONSUMERS SO IGNORANT THAT THEY DON'T REALIZE THE PURCHASE COST OF THE VEHICLE MATTERS? She could have bought a cheaper car, run it on gas, and gone to Hawaii twice.
Chevy Volt? Isn't that one of those coal-powered cars?

Was the airplane she flew to Hawaii in also battery-powered? Sounds like she burned more hydrocarbons than she saved.

Yes they are ignorant. And we are the ones being taken advantage of by the ignorant in having to subsidize them.

I read a story recently about how owners of electric cars are required to register them with the local utility. Before you can get a permit for a charging station in your home, they have to do an engineering study. If there's capacity it gets rubber-stamped. After you and a couple of neighbors get permits and the transformer is fully-loaded the next guy registers, gets permitted, and the utility comes out and replaces the transformer. Guess who gets the $10,000 bill for the transformer? The last guy.

The woman may have an unexpected surprise in her mailbox when she gets back from Hawaii.

Have you heard of a new psychological term called "range anxiety?" It's been attributed to Nissan Leaf owners. I don't get range anxiety in my ICE-powered truck.

I think you'll start to find those GE 62180s pretty soon for about $19.95. Yeah it may be $80-120 but the eyes are worth it.
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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Yeah.. I have to keep reminding myself that if people weren't so stupid we'd have to work a lot harder. :lol: But there is still the downside of having to survive the politicians that they accept and/or tolerate.

=====

OK, the LED snow cones are completely competent at 7' firing down, probably a little better if i get it even higher. It has a " bare bulb hanging from the ceiling" aesthetic but not completely red neck since the bulbs have a slight cosmetic treatment and not exactly like bare old school edisons. I can certainly live with the look for that much light from only 30W. 8-)

I am looking forward to LEDs reaching the economy of scale to attain their true economic pricing... never going to match <$1 incandescents, but should get low enough to pay for themselves in energy savings in a relatively short term.

====

Just saw an example of NG powered garbage trucks that cost roughly $30k more new, and save about $30k per year in fuel. That seems like a good ROI... Of course NG will not always be this cheap, when we finally get the infra structure built out to deal with the surge in new wells. World cost of NG is several times ours. We'll end up exporting it.

I notice gasoline prices have dropped at the pump here, and I think some of this is from reversing the pipeline direction to get more oil down to refineries near the gulf. Iran is just going through the motions so that wont last. The European crisis is making the dollar relatively stronger which is making oil cheaper...

Interesting year..

JR
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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OK, the LED snow cones are completely competent at 7' firing down, probably a little better if i get it even higher. It has a " bare bulb hanging from the ceiling" aesthetic but not completely red neck since the bulbs have a slight cosmetic treatment and not exactly like bare old school edisons. I can certainly live with the look for that much light from only 30W.
Cool. My wife didn't think too much of the standard screw base socket with the LED PAR downlight over the kitchen table. I sort of thought of it as the "industrial" look. I think the redneck look would require it dangling from the ceiling hanging by it's own wires. But, once she saw how good the LED lighting looked, she backed off on the industrial look complaints. Under the Sylvania LED PAR, flowers on the kitchen table have colors that just "pop."

I don't have the chart but someone did a spectrogram comparing LED/CFL/Incandescent. The CFL had a very messy spectrogram: the LED seems more pure and that may explain why things just look better. Some engineer from Cree recently wrote about how the LED downlights they installed on their own campus years ago weren't attracting bugs. I've noticed that too from the outdoor LED floods. There are some but not as many.
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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I have screwed the vanity fixture to the ceiling (just barely through sheet rock, but it is relatively light weight) and when off it looks a lot cleaner than the huge fluorescent fixture did, with it's circus tightrope support cable. The light output while completely competent, makes harder shadows, even with 4 lamps, than the long fluorescent tubes. I am happy with the result for efficiency and while I do not have a very high threshold for aesthetics, the new light mainly reveals how much I need to clean up my work area... Ideally a fixture with more lamps, and/or spaced further apart but that is starting to sound like some existing area lights, and more expensive than my budget solutions.

So I have moved beyond my initial negative impression and like my LEDs now... The light looks a little harder(?), more clinical (?) than the florescent if that makes any sense. Not better or worse, just different.

JR
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

Post by mediatechnology »

the new light mainly reveals how much I need to clean up my work area...
Another reason I keep mine dimmed.
The light looks a little harder(?), more clinical (?)
I really do find laser-marked SMT part numbers are far easier to read under the LEDs compared to GE Reveal Clear.

I just saw a teardown for a fairly unremarkable snowcone LED from LG. http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news ... light-bulb

There's a spectrogram of it:

Image

Most of the output is around 630 nm with a small peak from the blue LEDs. The Y-axis looks a little suspicious.

Hardness may be the right word in one sense since the LEDs seem to provide more "detail." I think as it relates to eyestrain - based on my experience - hardness may not be the right word.

This was taken under the Sylvania LED 3000 deg K PAR without any fill-flash:

Image
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Re: Residential Lighting with LEDs: Retrofitting the Pink Ra

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Well I swapped out the ballast and it appears to run warm to the touch just like the old magnetic LF ballast.

To my disappointment closer inspection reveals that these are old school T12s so according to that link, 40-50% available efficiency increase with newer t5-t8 but i don't know if that analysis was ASSuming low frequency magnetic ballast on the t12? My suspicion is perhaps only 10% improvement still available...

getting greener every day...

JR

PS: I looked at two internet videos purporting to show how to replace a ballast... both were pretty lame and not the best way IMO. For my lamp, the original lamp sockets have press in holes for two wires each contact. it is possible to just cut off the old wires and press the new wires into the unused holes. The videos suggested cut and splice new wires to old using wire nuts...
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LED Garage and Driveway Security Lighting

Post by mediatechnology »

Many years ago my Dad retrofitted the garage light covering the driveway with a T3 Halogen fixture. Other than appliance bulbs (refrigerator and vent hood) this was the only "tungsten" incandescent load in the entire house.

The T3 150W he had installed (I had never replaced it) had gotten dim and finally failed. The only replacement I had was for a 500W work lamp. That 500W consumed more than the entire night-time lighting load for the rest of the house. I used the 500W for a couple of nights and ended up turning it off. The intense light was pretty stark. The lowest wattage in a T3 I can find is 150W which, when new, produces about 2400 lumens. The broad flood pattern of the 500W T3 must have blinded my neighbors across the street. I decided it was time to bid farewell to the last regular-duty incandescent lamp.

I installed a new pair of the Sylvania LED21PAR38-DIM-P-930-FL-HVP (1100 lumens each, 21W, 30 degree, 3000K) a model that I already had experience with in the backyard. Unfortunately these are still $59.95 each at Lowe's. These lights are easy on the eye, have a relatively tight pattern, and won't blind the neighbors with the 500W "TV" studio light.

I finally also got around to installing a photocell which points west to a dark area. When the 150W T3 was operating that was one switch I was always eager to turn off. Now I won't have to.

Image
LED Driveway and Garage Cluster

http://www.waynekirkwood.com/Images/LED ... FL-HVP.jpg
Sylvania LED21PAR38-DIM-P-930-FL-HVP

Sylvania Ultra HD Pro-Series LED Lighting Catalog

The resulting LED retrofit produces 2200 lumens with 42W.

Curiously the photocell still has a RoHS-banned Cadmium Sulfide cell. I wonder what they use in Europe?

I've got a little aiming to do this evening to hit the driveway pad and horseshoe drive but, based on the very positive results in the back yard, I'm hoping for a couple of nicely-controlled pools of white 3000K light.

Based on 12 hours/day x 365 at $0.0875/kWh operating cost for the LED cluster should be about $16.10/year plus $21.04/year for the lamps. ($60x2+tax, 25,000 hour rated life, 4380 hours of use). How about we figure $37.14/year for the LED.

The incandescent T3 150W producing the same approximate lumens costs about $57.48 in electricity plus maybe $12 year for the lamp. (2000 hour rated life, 4380 hours of use.) Let's call it $69.48/year for the Halogen T3.

The LED savings appears to be roughly $32.34/year.

I didn't figure in the cost of conversion or the addition of a photocell because I would have gone back to PAR lamps anyway to control the pattern.
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