My solar powered indoor led lighting part 2

I have been working on some new LED lights for the house. I had previously posted my older setup in this thread. I liked the warmer color temperature I could get from Luxeons and I like the radiation pattern of the bare batwing emitters. They throw a bit more at an angle than they do strate down which makes for more even area illumination.




I mounted 3 Luxeons on a heat sink with Acrylic Silver adhesive and used low value resistors to connect them together. Each one was custom tuned to drive 400ma with 1.5 Ohms of wiring resistance factored in of a 12V power supply.







In reality my installation has more resistance than that and each one is really only getting about on average about 250ma which is ok with me as it is still very bright and runes the LED's cooler and more efficiently. I think it is better to have more LED's at a lower current then fewer at a higher recurrent. There are 17 panels of 3 Luxeons each for a total of 51 luxeons on the ceiling throughout the house currently. This mens I can light the house with about 50 watts which is PV generated.




I have another 27 Luxeons mounted at my work desk with reflectors on 3 of them. They provide an excellent amount of light for soldering and working up close.




I have designed 2 different PWM drivers for working with my new lights. One is quite simple and uses pot to control a 555 timer which drives a mosfet. The frequency ranges between 1 to 1.5 Khz so flicker is almost unnoticeable. The other is a PSoC microcontroler based driver which uses push buttons to cycle through different drive duty cycles on several different outputs. This will be used to control different zones in the house. It has a frequency of about 6 Khz. I was concerned about EMI but have not yet experienced any problems.

beautiful work! :thumbsup:

Those black heatsinks looks alot better than the previous versions of the aluminum bars.

Wow! That looks good.

Added to the fixed lighting index

NICE JOB!

I have some questions.
Where did you get your LED from? Were they warm white in color?
Have you tried using 5mm LEDs? I still have a buch around and would like light up a room with them.

Thanks

I have been collecting ther from various places for quite a while. They are primaraly made up of 2 different color bins. All the ones in the front room/kitchen are Q3's and to my eyes very white. The ones in the office, bathroom, and bathroom are Q2's whichare very warm/yellow with the slightest hint of green around the edges. I didn't think I would like them as much but I find them. They have no hint of the LED blue and render other colors like red and green beter. I first started out using 5mm led's about 6 years ago. I had 105 5mm in a single room and have to say that my room with 9 luxeons on the sceling is many times briter than the 5mm ever were. The wide even radiatin patern of the luxeons is much beter than the splotchy beams of many 5mm. But if you are starting from nonwhere and already have 5mm led's then go a head and use then. you can always upgrade later. When living in an apartment for a year after geting merried I could not put up my solar panels so I ran off a 12V AC/DC adapter.

Man I admire the ability to not go insane soldering all those LEDs and drivers by hand. That's impressive. Looks very professional too.

I run lots of stuff around the house off of my solar panels but if you wanted to come up with a small solar project that will just run a few LED's around the house you may want to look into some small cheep solar panels like the VW panels (try ebay). Or if you go into a VW dealer ship and ask nicely they may give you one. I and my brother have each gotten a free one from the dealership near my house. These panels are shipped with the cars from the factory so that the battery will not run dead as the cars sit in port. The added bonus of these panels is that some of the newer ones come with built in charge controllers. With my older Starfish Led setup I ran the led's for several weeks off of one of these 3.2 watt VW panels, it's charge controller and a 7ah SLA battery out of my throe spotlight. I was perhaps a bit more conservative with my light usage but it worked surprisingly well.

After seeing your set up several months ago, I was inspired to start making my own 12v lighting system for my house. I will probably run it mainly off the grid, as i live in OR and we don't get a ton of the sunshine (and I got wicked tall trees in my back yard). Hopefully i will be able to start up building my lights soon. But nice work!

I love the LEDs for low lighting, you've done a quite nice job. Ever thought about buying a roll of Cree or Seoul LEDs to get twice the brightness out of the same power, if you ever decide to expand your LED lighting?

I would love to do more LED lighting, particularly for spot and accent lighting, but it will be hard to find an LED solution that can replace my T8 fluorescent fixtures with high efficiency reflectors in places where I need lots of light (64 watts, about 5000 lumens out of the fixture, 86CRI @ 5000K)

I'm curious though, do you have any LED lights that you've set up with optics or reflectors to act as spotlights for things? Or are you mainly just running bare emitters for flood light?

That is awesome, great work! :goodjob:

that is so cool! People walking by the street when you have a power outage are going to be like "eh... you still have power?"

I am running IMS17 on the 3 LED's on the inside of the desk light at my desk. I am also planing on adding one of my ligh blocks above the head of the beed with 3 reflectors for reading in bed.

I would love to go with Cree's but that would have substantially increased to projects cost. I find these to work quite well and running multiple slightly less efficient LED's under speck is as good or beter than runing a few beter ones above speck.

We had a big storm here over the summer and everyone lost power for about 5 hours in the evening. We almost did not notice anything had happened except for the AC not working. At least all the ceiling fans run off the PV system. The cable modem and computer network was also still running so I could still surf CPF and the VoIP phone was still working.


I have also upgraded to my 12V PV system with substantially more wattage. I was runing the LCD monitor for my desktop directly off the 12VDC but it was starting to over tax the system. I was a bit concerned about increasing the LED output but now those concerns are a thing of the past.

Brlux said:

I run lots of stuff around the house off of my solar panels but if you wanted to come up with a small solar project that will just run a few LED's around the house you may want to look into some small cheep solar panels like the VW panels (try ebay). Or if you go into a VW dealer ship and ask nicely they may give you one. I and my brother have each gotten a free one from the dealership near my house. These panels are shipped with the cars from the factory so that the battery will not run dead as the cars sit in port. The added bonus of these panels is that some of the newer ones come with built in charge controllers. With my older Starfish Led setup I ran the led's for several weeks off of one of these 3.2 watt VW panels, it's charge controller and a 7ah SLA battery out of my throe spotlight. I was perhaps a bit more conservative with my light usage but it worked surprisingly well.

Click to expand...

I sent an email asking my local VW dealer to see if they had any that they would part with... Ile let ya know if and what there responce is.

I was wondering....can we mod those solar garden lights with a cree or luxeon?

I know its currently uses a cheap *** LED with one nimh AA. Even my photon keychain is brighter.

You probably could but it would likely be ran at the same drive current as the lame 5mm so it will not be anywhere as bite as you are used to a power LED being. It sounds like it uses some sort of simple step up converter to drive the LED which is going to be limiting your power, not to mention that there is not a lot of solar wattage on those lights. If it was running a power LED near speck then it would be dead very shortly after sundown.

It looks like your PV panels hang over your deck. Did you do that to block the sun and reduce heat to your house? What kind of view did you have to sacrifice?

The panels are mounted on the back patio of my condo. The picture is taken from above my back dore. The structure in the background is the neighbors condo. The only view that is being blocked is eachothers home and air conditioner. It actualy provides a bit more privacy for both of us.

I created a thread on the VW solar panels for those who want info on a small inexpensive solar pane to use as a starting point for LED home lighting.

Brlux,

I was reviewing the threads around here in anticipation of doing my own bit of XR-E LED 12v lighting. I came across this and it seems you've done exactly what I'm considering with Luxeons.

My question is this: I ran the resistor calculator to run 3 x XR-E's at ~500ma with a voltage drop of 3.75 (guess) across each and came up with a requirement for a single 1 ohm resistor in series with the XR-E's. I noted you used a resistor between each and was trying to read the bands to see what you used.

1) What ohm resistors did you use?
2) Why did you put one between each emitter instead of just one before the first emitter?