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Luxeon L.E.D. Lighting
It is now possible to get enough light out of one single LED to read by, play cards and many other activities. This LED is called Luxeon made by Lumileds, a joint venture between Agilent (HP) and Philips Lighting. You may have heard of them as Star LED and you can read more about them at http://www.luxeon.com.
The Luxeon III offers 20+ Lumens from a 1watt 3.42-volt (330ma) device that has a 50,000 hours life expectancy for under $10 and the newer Luxeon V offer 120 Lumens at 1 amp. These are not your typical electronic store LED that provide only 1 Lumen; these Luxeons are powerfull and require a heat sink to dissipate the heat to protect the LED.
I've created some simple task lighting for the dinette area, the galley and for the bathroom to be used instead of the incandescent lamps when dry camping to conserve the batteries. I used some of the warm Star LED (3500K), which still produce a cold bluish light that's cooler than fluorescents and also some of the regular Star LED (5500K) colder still but offers 2 Lumens more per LED.
To create each of the task lamps I used three LED in series and a small pulse width modulation (PWM) power source that provides the 3.42-volts at 85% efficiency from any DC input voltage ranging from 9 - 30 volts. These task lamps consume 1 watt for each LED and 1.5 watts of loss for the power supply for a total of 4.5 watts, a very reasonable 330ma at 12 volts.
Here are some images of the lamps to show how I put them together, I'll include an image of them lighting their respective areas as soon as I can borrow a light meter to help in comparing with other lighting sources.
I used aluminum channel to house the power supply, three LED emitters and to provide the heat sink required.
The task lamp with a white acrylic diffuser, aluminum sides and switch installed.
The lamp powered up with 12 volts DC. The power supply protects the LEDs and maintains the same light output from the different voltages found in the RV and can even be used on a 24 volt system.
