Are LED RV lights as bright as incandescent?
I find the brightness of the lights in my TT marginal at best. It is not that the lights are dim; it is just that even with both bulbs shining brightly, they only draw 30 watts of power. My average ho...
Forum Discussion
westend wrote:Nothing worse than buying a dozen or more of a color temp and then find out it's NOT what you want/like.Exactly! I first read about sampling from Tenbear's posts about LED's. I believe he's right about that, as are you.
If my old peepers can be trusted, I've also seen a difference between alike panels but from different sellers. There should be no difference if all the LED's are the same size, type, and amount. Some that I have put out less lumens than others and the color is just a very small bit different. I experimented with my DIY fixtures (glass lense) and could just make out small differences.
A big difference can be the driver circuitry for the LED's. the cheap ones use a dropping resistor (BAD!!) no current limit, and unbalanced current to a string. The good ones use a pulsed constant current source. LED's brightness is not a linear function of current, but there is also a power disipation issue. so for max brightness you pulse them with a high current and maybe 50% duty cycle fast enough you don't see flicker. This equals high light output. And you make sure the current is constant over any applied voltage and temperature. Current is also a strong function of junction temperature IF you try to apply a constant voltage. If your not careful you get thermal runaway. LED's are nowhere near 100% efficient, more like maybe 20-30% . the rest goes as heat. And some of the resistor dropping sourced ones from china are likely closer to 10% overall efficiency. Still better than the 1-2% of a incandesent.
LED's, incandesents, or floresent lights are a very efficient heat source, with a economical side benefit of just happening to put out a small amount of light for the power applied to them.
And then the very best LED'have a phosphor coating, like floresent tubes do, that absorb some of the 3 (or 4) colors (red, green, blue and sometimes some yellow) which are very very narrow wavelengths, and then emit and different wavelengths (colors) to help fill in color spectrum.
All this can yield very different results depending on how well (or poor) the system is designed.
