Flourescent Tubes to LED Benefits
Almost all of our 12vdc lighting is Flourescent Tube lighting currently. We do boon dock a couple of weeks each year. We have a 440AH battery bank. Other than control over the level of illumi...
Forum Discussion
mlts22 wrote:
The difference going between CFLs or tubes and LEDs isn't as great as from incandescent bulbs to LEDs, but it does help, and LEDs tend to last longer. This is nice, as I've had some fluorescent bulb fixtures take some finesse to replace the bulb without breaking it.
true. best I can tell via current measurements from my conversion is that the gain from florescent to LED is about 2:1 vs the 10:1 for incandescent to LED, and I do end up with more light, not a lot, but noticeably more with LED's.
That said, since we boondock lot's I did convert the floerescents to LED using some LED strips in each fixture. Actually ended up brighter than the floerescent. And you don't have the warmup time or light output vs. temp issues with LED's.
the trick in the whole thing is to
a) make sure you get LED's that are driven by a current regulator. That will control the current, and most then pulse the LED's to get max brightness w/o exceeding LED junction temp for long life.
b) get LED strips that have a good lense and construction on the diode.
Done correctly, the light from LED's is extremely uniform with no hotspots, much better than an incandescent and very similar to the pattern from a florescent tube.
