My LEDs
FYI: I have been posting updates for those of us who have already read the OP below. For anyone new to the thread, it might be best to skip down below all of these updates, read the body of the post...
Forum Discussion
KendallP wrote:
Figure this...
In my experience they use about 1/5 the power of incandescent per roughly the same amount of light output.. Therefore one could surmise that an incandescent bulb is losing about 5 times the energy to heat as the comparable set of LEDs. I know that my 1141 incandescents will burn the living cr@p out of my fingers after being on for just a half minute or so. (Well... truthfully... I can't be 100% sure. An experiment is supposed to be repeatable... and I only tried this once!)
My LEDs will be very warm, but will not burn me after running several minutes or more.
So just how hot are we talking here?
I agree with your reasoning on the overall heat load on the fixture. I guess what I was worried about was if the circuit board they are mounted to would melt down, and/or the foam stickies that are used to stick them to the fixture would have problems.
I don't have any way to measure the actual temp, but after reading your reply I did a little test. After the LEDs being on for 30 minutes I could hold my finger directly on an LED for about 5 seconds before it got painful. I could hold my finger on the back of the circuit board indefinitely without it getting painful. Based on that unscientific test I am starting to think the temps are nothing to worry too much about.
