Reasonably priced LED yard light ('wow')..any others out there?

I was looking for something in the 150 watt (max.) range to compliment a 175 watt standard metal halide used every night. This one would be plenty high (yet sheltered by a flying gable) and require the same expensive lift rental to install/maintain so the goal was obvious…never go up there again.

I priced matched an online company (MegaDepot?) with Amazon (delivery unacceptable) and ended up with this at 18,000 some odd (supposed) lumens supported by (supposed) brand name LEDs:

So far/so good.
The 4000K is a little hard to judge yet it is easy on the eyes in my opinion and ‘probably’ not the standard 5000k also offered. Coverage and beam pattern are pretty much off the charts at 28 some odd feet (looks left to a lesser elevation and right to a larger). The few adjustment holes provided are not as ‘micro adjustable’ as I would have liked yet this could be tackled with the proper time/skills (I overlooked this fact until the rental clock was running and I was bucket bound/30 feet in the air). Dislike also overlooked: the cord provided is not very long so I dealt with it and didn’t check the attachment point for a fix.

Conclusion? For under $200 shipped and after being quoted approx. $700 for 50% less lumens elsewhere…I’m in for the experiment. Much lesser lumen models were about the same price from this domestic importer and a 4000K wasn’t easy to find elsewhere without going brand name/big bucks.

Would love to hear from others who have found similar deals elsewhere on dimmable outdoor rated products at 100,000 lumens plus or minus.

Daylight savings time? I win. (it is literally ‘day’ everywhere that I need it to be) :wink:

You and I are alike.
I have always had an interest in lighting, waaaay before there was a BLF or such a thing as high power LED’s
Up until recently this is the brightest outdoor lighting mod I had done……more than 20 years ago.
In 1996 I bought this commercial building that housed a social club on the second floor. The social club had installed a number of exterior electrical boxes, each housing 2 ordinary E27 Halogen flood lights to light up the parking lot.

When I got the building I wanted more light, much more light. I got ahold of some high pressure sodium light fixtures that were used and came from a parking garage.

I installed them above the second story windows to get them further away for the ground. I installed a total of 7 of them, running at 250W each. That’s about all a 20A circuit can deliver. Each fixture puts out 16,000 lumen with new bulbs. They were already used when I installed them and after over 20 years of occasional use none have failed.
There are 5 of the fixtures along the top and 2 more on the back side of the building. After they are lit AND warm up the parking lot is, like yours, lit up like daylight. Except that Sodium lamps are quite warm in color.

In the lower right of the picture are 2 arrows, one Red and one Blue. They point to 2 light fixtures with regular LED bulbs, one RED and the other Green. They are connected to a bilge pump in the basement sump hole. In this picture the Red bulb is lit, proving there is power to the pump (piece of mind at a glance). The other fixture contains the Green LED bulb and is not lit because it only lights up when the bilge pump is actually running. Because I sometimes make work into fun I also connected a runtime meter to keep track of how many hours the bilge pump has run. In 21 years it has thankfully only run for a total of 2.6 hours.
Someday I will strip out the innards of the Sodium lights and install some LED’s

Yep…birds of a feather. :wink: We’ve both been blessed to have had the opportunity to buy decent quality (used or not) when that quality existed without breaking the bank. Now we’re amazed (at least I am) that we can buy an entire outdoor rated fixture of ??? quality for near the price of what they want for a single high lumen replacement bulb at (much) > than 100,000L/4000K/(and at least now)150W consumed.

I picked up a 130,000L/4000K mogul based Satco bulb that I never price shopped for that same project which was well over $100 Satco|Nuvo S9676 Product Page
At the same time, I lucked in to knowing somebody who recently installed (12) of these in their church parking lot so we’ll see what they’re all about over time. They are dimensionally pretty big and I believe need 9-10 inches all around. I’m hoping to ceiling bounce mine as a single source light in a tall garage with open ceilings/rafters until I find a simple (used) mogul base that will work/reflect properly. My hope is to get it far enough up there so that it doesn’t blind me yet I’m not sure if that is possible. These 360 degree corncobs, even the $50 ones from Menards, are bright. It would be nice if others would chime in here to get a good grip on the replacement bulb market considering the physical size limitations for existing fixtures. My local Lowes and Home Depot want nothing to do with this market segment (apparently) so one wonders if they’re all junk (now) to begin with.

I’ve always been surprised that more don’t use lights/run time meters as you did with your pump for peace of mind. They’re used all around us for the same purpose and it’s not rocket science/cheap. Ditto with water sensors/kill switches/temperature alarms in our homes. Worse is the culture of refusing to install gauges of any sort in initial industrial/commercial installations or (heaven forbid) the simplest recordings of baseline data for troubleshooting purposes later.
Then again, why does your neighbor cloak his place in complete darkness believing that you’ll be able to watch out for him too…from a distance?

…nobody out there bypassing high output (outdoor) ballasts and simply installing LEDs?

Gutting 4- 8 foot HO florescent fixtures and replacing them with 32,000 lumens of LED’s each
128,000 lumen total, in the garage!






Here is another

I got a number of these brand new high quality commercial fixtures for $3 each. They had proprietary CFL sockets, the reason I got them so cheap. The idea is to strip out the ballasts and sockets and replace them with LED’s


Here are 4 E27 sockets installed with 4 - 1600 lumen LED bulbs installed for a total of 6400 lumen

BUT, I think these are a much better option.
That aluminum base plate is pretty thick.


They cost less than $2 each and have a self contained 110VAC driver. They come in 20, 30 and 50W versions
LOTS of lumens. 4 of those in that fixture should be about 16,000 lumen.

dchomak,
I believe that you have just inspired many of us out here to look at our present fixtures ‘in a whole new light’ :wink: Thank you for taking the time to share.

Quick question(s) please:
Is there much field experience out there with the last 110V driven LEDs shown?..
Can you pay more than $2 ea. to receive better quality LEDs from different manufacturers (or receive varying Kelvin ratings)?
…and are you referring to the thickness of the metal that they would somehow be attached to as the minimum heatsink needed for say a 50W module?

If I could somehow simply install ‘x’ number of those in an old fluorescent tube fixture by simply laying a long piece of metal/heatsink in there to attach them to (while still saving the reflector)…what’s not to like?

Get one-a these… :smiling_imp:

I think the thick aluminum would help conduct heat away from a 50W module into the rest of the base.

I just learned of those modules from this thread How to light a two car garage for under $30

DoubleA posted links to these in post #20 of that thread.
Big Clive posted some tear downs of these modules. Very interesting and informative. He seems to think that the quality is good, even though the price is very cheap.

You will not find any long term experience with the IC 110V COBs because they just became widely available in the last few months. I first spotted them in June on eBay while looking for small COB chips for a daytime DIY bike light project and bought my first one. The idea of being able to avoid using a 12V LED driver seemed like a real advance. It also reminded me how hot small high-powered COBs will get and that you need to mount them on metal. The biggest surprise was the low cost though I had already bought small 12V 10W COBs without the IC for a dollar each. Don’t worry about losing the reflector base on a fluorescent lamp retrofit because all of the light from the chip shines in about 120 degrees from the COB. A fluorescent lamp shines 360 degrees so much of the light shines toward the fixture. That’s exactly why my 7 bar light LED garage lighting system works so well. It’s much more efficient than using LED light bulbs because all of the light shines down from the ceiling.

I used a couple of the 7W 76 LED COBs that I bought from Banggood in my whole-house LED retrofit. They’ve been in use for about two years now without a single failure. I always mounted them on metal fixtures or metal plates if used without a fixture. They get warm but not hot and certainly never anywhere near as hot as an incandescent bulb.

The only problem with 120V LED fixtures, COB or discrete, is the nasty nasty flicker. Most I’ve seen are just LEDs and distributed resistance so that the total RMS power doesn’t pop the LEDs, but there’s still lots of off-time that has the LEDs completely dark for a big chunk of the AC cycle. Think of LED Christmas-lights. Rather high peak power, but lots of dark-time. Like little stabbing spikes of light…

I’ve got a nightlight that’s got that hideous 120Hz flicker. I’ve never ever complained about a flashlight’s PWM, as most times I don’t even notice it, but this nightlight just grates on me.

If they have at least a bridge-rectifier and capacitor to smooth the current and thus light output, great, but cheap fixtures probably don’t have that. And caps will always be the weak link in any toasty circuit, so…

^
Yes.
Big Clive did another video demonstrating that.

I’d like to know whether taking the time to tackle these projects is worth the effort as well.
After receiving over 18,000+ (4000K) dimmable lumens for under $200 shipped (twice; first to the mainland distributor) in an outdoor rated fixture; it just doesn’t seem possible that you cannot receive a reasonable amount of directed or undirected light at a reasonable tint in umpteen different lesser powered models.

I’ve got two oversized 5000K/4000K corncob lights now just sitting in their boxes which will probably be used for emergency lighting of some sort due to the hassle of finding something that they will fit in to properly reflect them. I would switch everything over to these comparably low wattage dimmable outdoor rated flood type lights yet I’m still baffled as to why so few seem to be using them…(so far/so good for me).

$146 shipped (Amazon)
10,033 lumens/80 watts/4000K

What is a heavy duty HPS/MH(etc.) yard light running these days and how much have we been/are we paying for a 10,000+ lumen flashlight?
Two 10,000+ models located (high) next to the front/back of a house (on a switch based over-ridable type motion) and (hopefully) never touch them again.

“It’s like night and day” pretty much describes the 18,000 lumen version in terms of experiencing your property at pitch dark versus previously (yard light or not; sorry don’t do pics).

Last summer on our anniversary we went to Niagara Falls.

While my wife was shooting pictures of the Falls, I was doing what any normal flashaholic would do.
Checking out the lighting system. :innocent:
As you can see we are quite a ways up on this observation deck. That’s water and trees straight down below. This is a picture of the only flood light on that side of the deck.

I knew when I shot this picture that I could blow up the information stamped on the fixture and check it out later.
It’s an “ECOMOD 450”, a 450W LED flood light.

It’s “only” 40,000 lumen. I say that because my brother and I put 128,000 lumen in his garage. :laughing:

Here is a short video on that ECOMOD 450

Today I received a couple of those modules.
First off, they are a big disappointment. They are not very bright and they consume a LOT of power.
My estimation is that they are about as bright as a 7W LED bulb (about 800 lumen) but consume probably in excess of 30W.
The ones I ordered should have been rated at 50W with 4 driver chips on the right. I got 2

Here is one held up against a 15W, 1600 lumen “dedomed” LED light bulb.

This photo was taken during the middle of the day, hard to tell how much light is output. For this shot I placed identical domes over each light, and also took a shot of the ceiling over both lights running at the same time.

Thanks a bunch for the update on those lights and for the pics (the 450 watt LED pics as well).

I guess that I’m back to scrounging for flea market/garage sale priced antique light fixtures/shielding in both standard and mogul bases for (indoor rated) corncobs… :frowning:

$150 for 10,000+ and $200 for 18,000+ (lower Kelvin) lumens sporting an outdoor rating (to boot) might be far less of a headache at this time.

If you’re gonna do it, do it right. I got these from eBay. Good price, lots of light, super easy to install. My backyard is about 180’ X 100’ and these light it up like daytime. Check it out. Good luck.

Led floodlight

Thanks, I may try one of these someday. Too bad they don’t come in warm white tint. Or do they?

It’s dark outside now so I did a further test to show just how bad these modules are. It’s too bad, I had high hopes for them and as bad as they are, they are much better than the ones I ordered previously about a year ago.
On the left is a 1600 lumen, 15W LED light bulb. To the right is a module with an identical dome covering it I cut off another bulb.
It’s pretty apparent from this picture that the bulb on the left is much brighter than the module on the right

Next I held a box up halfway between the 2 lights. I adjusted the height so that the shadows are directly over each light.

At first this may be counter intuitive, but the lighter shadow on the left is over the brighter of the 2 lights, the 1600W LED bulb. It is important to realize that that shadow is cast by the module. The shadow on the right is cast by the bulb.
The darkness of the 2 shadows show the relative brightness of each light And from this picture it is obvious the bulb beats the module by a large margin!
Next I measured the wattage of each light. Believe it or not, the brighter of the 2 used half the watts! Further proof these modules SUCK.
LED bulb on left, module on right.

https://www.amazon.com/Richday-Outdoor-Lighting-Waterproof-Security/dp/B01KHFC7H6/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512182116&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=richday+led+flood+light

I got a pair of these a few weeks ago. At first I was a little disappointed in the output. It did not seem 9 times as bright as the 11w "100 watt equivalent" indoor bulbs I had. I have not tested either but these are quite a bit brighter. I got the warm white ones 2700K and it seems to be spot on it is quite a warm white, whereas the bulbs were bright white, which I find kind of obnoxious. But I reevaluated it after I got it hooked up to a proper cord and could move it around. It has two LED chips and the drivers are in the lower box. LEDs are stuck with gunk right onto the back of the case. The really nice thing is there is no flicker, between that and the nice color it is quite a civilized light.