Does This Light Make Me Look Green?

Our 5th wheel trailer has lots of lights inside, and most of them use 12 volts.  The few 120 VAC fixtures use such low wattage bulbs that they are almost useless.

Most of the 12 volt lamps are wedge-base bulbs like this

They are not very efficient, and actually seem to generate more heat than light.  Turn one on for a few seconds, and you will have to wait a couple minutes before you touch it – I have brands on my fingertips to prove it.

The folks who “boondock” a lot have long sang the praises of replacing incandescent lights with LEDs, but until this week I had avoided making the change – mostly because of the initial expense, but also because it seemed like too much trouble. 

Until recently, the only viable replacement for those bulbs was a printed circuit board mounted with LEDs.

Installing these boards required modifying the light fixtures slightly and mounting the p-c board with double-sided foam tape.  Prices have been dropping lately, but they are expensive – when I first started looking just over a year ago, they were about $10 each, and most of our light fixtures would require two of them.

Monday, I found an acceptable alternative, an LED light shaped more-or-less like the bulb it is designed to replace, and priced at only a dollar apiece.

This 20 LED lamp is a straight one-to-one replacement for the incandescent bulb.  Just pull out the old bulb and plug one of these in its place. 

When you do, you only have a 50% chance that it will burn, but that’s not as bad as it sounds.  LEDs are diodes, after all, and a diode only conducts electricity in one direction.  If the new light doesn’t burn, simply pull it out, turn it over and plug it back in.

The light they produce is slightly brighter than the incandescent bulb they replace – noticeably brighter when one of each is in a two-light fixture – and it is  much whiter.  Although the LEDs themselves are yellow when off, and I chose the “warm white” version, it still appears almost bluish white when compared to the yellow-white of the old incandescent bulb.

These lights consume almost no power, they don’t get hot and they are supposed to last for thousands of hours – dozens of times longer than the incandescent bulbs they replaced.