LED Lighting

We look forward to some out-of-the-way camping this Fall without amenities such as Electric service, water or sewer hookups. To that end we beefed up our 12VDC energy supply with a 100AH LiFeMnPO4 ‘Lithium’ Battery.  Now we need to look at electrical conservation as the second half of our strategy to get along with a Battery and Solar Charger (as any Green person knows the cheapest most available Power is that which you don’t use).

An LED light use about 1/5 the electricity a standard incandescent bulb does and about 1/2 that of a fluorescent bulb to produce the same amount of light. So we went shopping for 12VDC LED RV interior lighting and found http://www.starlightsinc.com/. Our Marco TT, like many RVs these days, came equipped with interior lights which use the very familiar 921 incandescent bulb, each of which uses 1.25 Amps of current. The Star Lights LED replacement uses 250 Ma or 1/5 the power of a 921 bulb. So we ordered some from Tweetys.com @ $28.35 each.

Installation was a snap: simply pull the clear cover off the light, unplug the 921 bulb and plug in the LED light.

But will they really produce enough light? Earlier attempts at LED interior lighting usually produced a dim bluish light unacceptable for general lighting.

  Yes!

The new LED lights produce

enough light that one replaces

two of the incandescent lights.

The light produced is soft white

rather than the awful blue

of older LED lights.

We are Happy Campers.

One caution about LED lights is that they must have regulated  voltage supplied to them or they have an extremely short service life. That was another downfall of early LED lights. These units each have internal regulator circuitry.

Lew