Free lighting

[David ColwillParticipant @davidcolwill19261]

Earlier this year I had a job that involved fitting 100 GU10 led spot lamps to a piece of scenery. whilst sliding the lamp unit in place one of them had the pins knocked off. I kept the damaged unit and filed it away. It surfaced last week during a clean up and I took it apart.

What I ended up with was a disc 43mm diameter by 10mm thick comprising a circuit board and a plastic lens. Running at 9V it draws 120ma and gives a very respectable light.

Whilst playing about with it I accidently connected it to the wrong side of my power supply which caused it to get so hot that it melted the solder on one of the leads. Miraculously it survived!

So should you come across one that is defunct it may be worth a play. We paid £4-00 each for them (in quantity).

Not sure if this will help anyone.

Regards David.

[David ColwillParticipant @davidcolwill19261]

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

The price here seems to range from $3 to $4.50. The voltage range for them is interesting 85V to 265V, I hope they are not like my 10W LED flood light I have in the workshop, the RFI is so bad it drowns out the workshop radio, but I cured that by running it through an isolating transformer.

There is some complaints that some of them are mechanically/electrically lethal.

Ian S C

[David ColwillParticipant @davidcolwill19261]

Ian

They certainly are pretty flimsy things and I'm not sure that I'd want one anywhere that could be knocked. I have put 4 of them in our kitchen and they seem alright to me. My main reason for changing over to LED lights is the abysmal life span of a halogen. One batch of 10 bulbs lasted a little over 3 weeks in the fitting over my desk. Fortunately they were leftover from a job so I wasn't paying.

However I was only trying to point out that should anyone have a faulty one it may well yield a very nice compact low voltage light source.

Regards.

David.

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

David, I quite agree, and when you know the fragility of them, they should be no problem, it's only trouble to those who don't recognise the short comings.

Ian S C

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

I replaced a 8W flourescent tube fitting for a camper van with two LED panels, each with 48 LEDs on it.

I just measured one at 228mA on a 12v battery so two would be somewhat less than 6W.

The output was hugely brighter than the old fluorescent and it is actually bright enough to light the whole inside of the van for most purposes

Neil.

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