I decided to replace the 12 volt/10 watt/90 lumen under-counter G4 halogen bulbs in my kitchen with LED bulbs. There are tons of these replacements available on Ebay. They come in three basic types:
Pure Crap: these have just current limiting resistors on them. Hook them to a DC source and you have a 50:50 chance of light. Hook them to an AC source and you get what amounts to 60 Hz PWM. Also, the negative cycle of the AC waveform is BAD for LEDs.
Crap: these add a bridge rectifier and maybe a filter cap to the Pure Crap style.
OK: these have a constant current regulator on the board. They usually run at least $5 each.
I found these on Ebay from a US seller and bought 10 of each. They arrived in a couple of days. Then he reduced the price even more… story of my life. I measured 100 lumens and 2 watts in. He has (had?) 3000K and 6000K. The LEDs are arranged 2S x 5P. Very nice bulbs, can’t beat the price.
Note that electronic halogen ballasts don’t like to be lightly loaded. I had to replace mine with 12V wall warts, otherwise the ballast and bulbs buzzed.
Hi, I am currently looking for some drop-in G4 bulbs to replace AC driven side-emitting halogen bulbs, but there seems to be fantastically low choice.
[edit: after researching some of these would seem to fall under the ‘crap’ category in texas’s post. Morever, as I now know they probably won’t work well with halogen electronic transformers due to low-load, and will cause flickering)
I moded my under-counter G4 halogens for LEDs. I used those multiple LED regulated disks and replaced the LEDs with two Nichia 219 high CRI neutral white LEDs from illumination supply.
thanks, nice to see these boards are moddable, and with the current i guess heatsinks aren’t necessary
how did you set the right current for your nichias?
until i get to that stage, i guess i’ll just have to order these boards and see how they run
I just used what the driver on the board output. It is a 2 watt driver. The original LEDs were arranged as 5 paralleled groups of 2 LEDs in series. I stripped them all off and just used two Nichia’s in series. Tracing the wiring of the original LEDs to find out how they were arranged and where to wire the new LEDs in was a bit tedious.
This is a G4 LED Bulb. The first thing is these g4 led bulbs have full CE and RoHs approval. That means you can be sure of the quality. And g4 led light bulbs have a very long lifetime up to 50 000Hr.
Recently I replaced about 70% of our “puck light” G4 halogen blubs with LED disc that I purchased on lightingnext. They work great and the color/brightness is almost identical to the G4 blubs.
given up hoping there’ll be something catering directly for us so i’ll have to think like you do