Luxeon room lighting

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evan9162

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Apr 18, 2002
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2,639
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Boise, ID
I've made some living room lighting with a few 1W'ers.


room1.jpg


Inside each of these lanterns is a 1W HD. There are two strings (one with the three by the TV, and one with the three near the fireplace:

room2.jpg


room3.jpg


The LS are set on a small heatsink:

room4.jpg


The whole system is driven by a 12V power supply. The PS output cable plugs into another small box, which has some fuses and current limiting resistors, and output plugs (which each string plugs into). I could potentially add another string (though I'm running out of places to put lanterns) - the PS will deliver up to 3.5A. Each strand draws 350mA, for a total of 700mA.

In the event of a power outage, a 12V battery (or an 8 cell alkaline battery pack) could be plugged in, giving emergency lighting. Also makes for nice mood lighting /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
 
Nice job! If we get enough folk into LED fixed lighting it would be worth having a subgroup in CPF. Seems most folk are more into torch/flashlights and these posts get lost easily, where a dedicated subgroup would have all these sorts of posts together - just a thought.

george.
 
Very, very nice /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif I may have to think about starting a project like that over the holidays as I think they woul be the perfect lighting solution to my living room as well.

-Jason

ps. nice living room /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif
 
Thanks all -
The cost for these wasn't too bad either (I don't usually worry too much about the economics of my little projects anyways)

Here's the cost breakdown:
PS = $16
PS "breakout" box (plugs, fuses, resistors, etc) ~$10
Each lantern: $11-$13 each (LS - $4, HS - $1.50, Lantern - $5 (small), $7 (large) )

This was a fun project that I'd been wanting to do for a while. The biggest obstacle was finding an appropriate host for the LEDs. At first, I was looking at an upturned cup style housing that would be mounted to the wall, pointing up at the ceiling. However, I never found anything that would work that way - so I went hunting around and found these lanterns for cheap.
 
[ QUOTE ]
georges80 said:
Nice job! If we get enough folk into LED fixed lighting it would be worth having a subgroup in CPF. Seems most folk are more into torch/flashlights and these posts get lost easily, where a dedicated subgroup would have all these sorts of posts together - just a thought.

george.


[/ QUOTE ]

I absolutely agree. My next set of projects (once I quit my addiction to mods) is indoor lighting and then landscape lighting. I'd love to chuck my 300W transformer in lieu of a much smaller one to light up my yard.

BTW, that looks like a considerable amount of light in that room. Is that the only light source in the photo's?

CM
 
[ QUOTE ]
IlluminatingBikr said:
Where did you get luxeon stars for $4.00? What bin are they?

[/ QUOTE ]

I invested in Wayne's 50-luxeons-for-$200 bulk deal. They all were(except for 2 loose stars) bin Q2J still attached on the 16 star block. The groups I got even had sequential, adjacent serial numbers!

50lux.jpg
 
[ QUOTE ]
CM said:
[ QUOTE ]
georges80 said:
Nice job! If we get enough folk into LED fixed lighting it would be worth having a subgroup in CPF. Seems most folk are more into torch/flashlights and these posts get lost easily, where a dedicated subgroup would have all these sorts of posts together - just a thought.

george.


[/ QUOTE ]

I absolutely agree. My next set of projects (once I quit my addiction to mods) is indoor lighting and then landscape lighting. I'd love to chuck my 300W transformer in lieu of a much smaller one to light up my yard.

BTW, that looks like a considerable amount of light in that room. Is that the only light source in the photo's?

CM

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, those were the only source of light for the picture - note that it was a 2 second exposure. Tonight, I'll try to take an exposure that more realistically reflects eye-visible brightness (after a few minutes of dark adaptation)
 
evan9162,

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/popcorn.gif

Can't wait for the day when we're using LED's as primary light sources. Just a matter of time.
 
Here's a shot that's pretty close to eye level brightness (cameras don't respond the same way the eye does)

roomeye.jpg



The bright spots aren't so bright (around the lanterns), and the dark areas are actually brighter - the light/shadow patterns on the cieling were my "measure" for setting the exposure.
 
Very Nice! I like it a lot!

The lamps you chose are very nice too. I think there's a whole lot more that can be done with Luxeons beyond flashlights, and you certainly have an excellent demonstation of that!

Again, that's a very nice looking lighting system you made there. Someday I'll find the time to post my not so exciting (or stylish) outdoor Luxeon lights. I'm sure you discovered running more than one Luxeon from a power source takes some careful control. It wasn't as easy as I imagined.

Thanks for sharing!
 
I am very interested in this. We have an out-building with no power to it, have to run 150 feet worth of extension cord just for some decent light. Something like this would be nice because of the long run times off batteries. Besides, how long you figure the run time would be off a 12 volt car battery? I mean, I don't want to tie up a bunch of flashlights for this. It would be better to have dedicated units for the lighting. I hope there is enough interest for another sub-group.

Mike
 
Lambda:
Thanks - actually, the power source wasn't too bad. I just used a 3.6 ohm resistor in series with three - there wasn't enough voltage difference to use an lm317 in current mode like i wanted to. However, to protect everything, I added 1A fuses in series of each strand, so if thermal runaway happens, it'll blow a fuse before destroying any of the LEDs.

yam:
total, this draws 700mA at 12V. If you assume a car battery is 50A-H, and you can only discharge halfway (to protect the battery), then that's 25 A-H. Divide by 0.7, and you get almost 36 hours from an average car battery. Double that for one strand of 3 LEDs. If you use a switching voltage converter, you could drive a single luxeon for nearly 3 times that even, for about 300 hours from a single car battery (one luxeon using a switching converter).


[edit]

Here are the lanterns:
small:
lantern.jpg


large:
lantern2.jpg
 
[ QUOTE ]
yam said:
I am very interested in this. We have an out-building with no power to it, have to run 150 feet worth of extension cord just for some decent light. Something like this would be nice because of the long run times off batteries. Besides, how long you figure the run time would be off a 12 volt car battery? I mean, I don't want to tie up a bunch of flashlights for this. It would be better to have dedicated units for the lighting. I hope there is enough interest for another sub-group.

Mike

[/ QUOTE ]

I sold some of my dome modules recently to a company that of all things makes composting toilets. There's some on the Deschutes River in Oregon that are now Luxeon lit /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif The toilets have solar panels and I guess a gellcell for the system to work - so that's where the power for my dome module comes from. LED lit potty

george.
 
evan,

Very nice! Color looks real nice too.

george,

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif Wish I'd seen your site before. There's so many good stuff hiding in the nooks and crannies around here. I wish I was retired and had more free time to search out this place.
 
Wow -- color me impressed! That's a fantastic way to have low level, energy conserving WHITE light. Great work. In the near future I'm going to be making a desk lamp (nothing fancy) with a 1W Luxeon and 120VAC so I might just PM you with some questions later on if you have no objections.
 
Very nice indeed. I'm sure that it really helped the overall look to have a bunch of Luxeons from the same bin and vintage that are actually sisters.
 
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