Switching to LED lighting
We would like to switch all the lights out on our Raptor and wondering if anyone had any suggestions as which ones to go with and how hard it is to do?
Forum Discussion
derwud wrote:
Quality Control. It sounds simple, but the stuff you buy off E-bay is copied******that has no engineering or quality control. M4 buys lights, tries them, test them till failure and then fixes them. I like M4's way better, I am tired of being a Guinea pig!
But if they work (and they do) I'm not too concerned about quality control. I understand being cautious about buying cheap, counterfeit merchandise from China. However, we're just talking about LEDs strung together on a circuit board. I see that M4 put a little more thought into theirs with an aluminum body and heat sink "to keep heat away from your fixture", which might be useful for some people or applications but not for my old RV's lights. The panels don't get hot enough to damage the lenses that they are resting on. At $1.65 each, I can replace my eBay lights 7 times before I get to the cost of a single M4 light. And the M4s are 16 LEDs; the eBay ones are 48 LEDs.
That being said, I've had 4 out of 23 eBay panels "fail". In these "failed" units, groups of LEDs will flicker until they're warmed up. It's annoying, but they still work and stop flickering after a minute or two. 3 of the 4 that failed in this manner were the outside porch lights. I leave them on 24x7 (the RV is plugged in). It's no excuse for failure, but it might have something to do with it. I will be replacing them, however. Even with this 17% failure rate, I'm way ahead of the game cost-wise ($45 including replacements for the failed panels versus $276 for 23 M4s).
Just for fun I ordered an $11.99 M4 1156 replacement panel as well as their $14.99 COB panel (both in warm white) to see how they stack up brightness- and reliability-wise to the $1.65 eBay units. According to M4, the COB uses nearly twice as much power as the LED panel, but still 1/6 of an incandescent 1156 bulb.
