I think Id avoid the hamster ball in future lighting projects. Its good to hear that the wiring didnt fail inside a wall and burn your house down.
Have you tried CFL spotlighting yet?
I have one of these mounted on one side of my garage ceiling to illuminate the car engine bays and toolboxes. All three heads can swing in any direction. You could get something similar with 2 heads and point one head down each coridor. I use 3 x 23W CFL spots. They provide a pleasing neutral glow and put out an amazing amount of light. Or you could use the same unit as mine and point one straight down at the apex with a 13W CFL spot and aim the other two down each end with 23W CFL spots. They also work well as reflective lighting and you could point them at your ceiling to diffuse the beam and adjust the aim to get them perfectly to your liking. The beams actually have quite a wide diffuse angle and dont provide any annoying hotspot.
If you must LED, have you selected your host yet? If you can get some larger thick copper plumbing pipe and conceal it behind a glass fixture, then you've got the heat sink portion covered. You could even use a rubber mallet or vice to squeeze the pipe into an oval if more space is needed. Then fujik your stars to the pipe in the usual manner. As for a power supply, do you have any computer recycling companies close by? Id go with a name brand laptop power supply (no chinese dx type junk on this project) since it needs to be completely safe and reliable. Assemble your LED fixture, grab your DMM, alligator clip wire jumpers and some plated paper clips and bring them along with you so you can test which power supply provides what you are looking for. Use the data plate on the supply only as a basis, not as the gospel for what the actual measured output will be. I have noted during my LED lamp conversion that several completely identical power supplies did not provide nearly the same output, especially while direct driving an LED. Once you've found what you like, leave the supply plugged in for an hour before you buy it to see how warm it gets. A quality properly rated supply will get warm but not hot and are designed to sustain a rated load with a 100% duty cycle.
No computer recycling companies? There's always ebay for used power supplies but then you wouldnt be able to load-test them with your particular setup.
IMO, CFL's still sound a lot easier and far more cost effective at this point in the technology time line.
Even though the last two posts appear to be spam, I thought I'd mention the 1.3W LED "bulbs" I got from Wal-Mart. About $8 I think.
As I recall the frosted one is rated for 69 lumens, and the clear, 72 lumens. So, they are pretty dim, but I put 5 of them in my house anyway. 2 are in lamps in the kid's room, so I don't have to yell at them for wasting electricity when they leave the light on all day/night. The kids have managed to break off both of the outer glass enclosures so they are not very durable (not that anything glass is going to be durable around kids), but the LEDs inside continue to work. 2 more are in desk lamps, and the last one is in a reading lamp. All work fine for their intended purpose, reading or typing. I wouldn't try to illuminate a room or hallway though, not even a closet.
The clear version has a mottled "beam pattern" casting light and dark areas, so the frosted flavor is probably what you want unless you're putting it in a lamp with a shade.
The emitters themselves appear to be a cluster of standard 5mm through-hole LEDs, but with a "slow phosphor" to eliminate 60Hz flicker (there is an afterglow effect when switching the bulb off). Indeed, they don't flicker, except when my laser printer warms up.
As I expect these are probably cheap crappy LEDs, I imagine they will not last their full rated lifetime before dimming, but so far so good after several months. As long as they last long enough to pay for themselves, I think I'll be happy. In the case of the kid's room, they're probably already close to break-even. ;)
ok so this may be an old thread but as i have converted my entire home to run led light bulbs i would certanly recommend these
i have a 4 bar gu10 strip in my kitchen that used to run 50w halogens these have now been replaced with 3x2w dimmable led's imho these are actualy brighter
these have been running without a problem for over 6 months now before i was swapping out a halogen bulb at the rate of one every 2-3 months for the same price these cost me
i aslo have two light fittings in my living room with these bulbs in each with 3 bulbs
2 fittings in my hall one top one bottom with 3x1watt gu10
and one of each fitting with the same 3x1w's for the bedroom but i used warm white in these i have had to relpace 2 of these but the leds still work the driver is the weak point there
in the bathroom i used blue leds
got the light fitting as a job lot and fleabay cost me £20 for 10 light fittings plus postage
the 3x1w were about £3 each the 3x2w dimmable slightly more expensive at £7 plus postage
i have also converted a freinds house over to these after he saw mine
the price of high power led is dropping fast, now you can buy a 100w led for 12$(ofc chinese with low CRI) in 5 years we will convert the fluorescent/halogen lamps in led
I think there is an updated answer to the question of this old thread. At this moment almost every type of light bulb in a house can be replaced by an equally or better performing led bulb. The market is quite overcrowded with cheap meh-performing trash led bulbs, but if you are able to ignore that there are are really good performing led bulbs from the established brands (Philips, Cree, Sylvania). The only area that is not covered well as far as I know is the replacement of 4000K halogen bulbs, high CRI 4000K leds are available (we all know the Nichia 219 92CRI) but I have not seen a high output householt bulb with them.
The spam post was deleted before you saw it leaving poor djozz next in line…lol… was definitely a spammer with link to his website. They love to resurrect older threads and slip in their links.
Eventually, we will all want to convert all lights to led, except when we need the heat of incandescents, such as to dry out the bathroom if it has no separate electric heater. Since they are rapidly getting cheaper, it might be cheaper to weight longer for those that are not constantly used. I have found that for dimming lights the dimmer as well as the bulb needs changing.
I recently bought a double LED outdoor rated flood light from Lowes for $50 and it is outstanding. The fixture and bulbs come together, so if you compare it to buying the base and bulbs for a conventional flood light, it is very similar. And I am telling you the light it throws off is great, very clean and powerful and very cheap to operate. Good luck, Ed
My house has over 300 LED bulbs… the only incandescent bulbs are in the ’fridge, microwave, and ovens. Also two wall mounted reading lamps on swing arms next to a bed. They use a funky hotdog shaped bulb that nobody makes a LED replacement for… plus, I never use them
As far as incandescent lights being good room heater, the really are not… particularly in recessed ceiling cans. Most of the heat goes up into the ceiling and provides little effective room heating. There is no forced air flow to move the heat where it can do some good.
Also, LED bulbs save you very little on your cooling bill. A typical air conditioner might use 1 watt of electricity to move out 40 watts of heat. So each LED bulb might save you 1 watt of cooling power… rather trivial to what the AC unit is sucking…
Its good to hear that the wiring didnt fail inside a wall and burn your house down.