Modded porch light

[dnix71]

I have two Phillips brand porch lights from Home Depot that use a photo switch and a 13 watt self ballasted cfl.

26 watts 14 hours a day, call it 2.5kwh a week, or 10 kwh a month. That doesn't sound like much power, but because I am on batteries as much as possible, it's actually 1/3 of my monthly consumption from the grid.

The Phillips brand porch light is more reliable than the Lights of America brand it replaced but puts out much less usable light. Corkscrew cfls don't have anywhere near the light output efficiency of linear fluorescents. The LOA lights had a 13 watt instant start biax tube and a fancy circuit board. The photo sensor was instant, so it flickered at dusk and dawn and the circuit board was accessible to bugs and humidity. The housing design was so poor, the photosensor would see it's own light and flicker off/on from that, too.

Not being happy with either design, I decided to experiment. There are no cfl porch lights with a built-in sensor at Home Depot that use less than 13 watts. I only need to see the door in the dark, not light the whole court yard where I live. There were also very few choices at HD for self-ballasted LED lights with Edison bases. There are a lot of LED track light substitutes for 12v halogen spots. A spot beam is what LED's do well, but I didn't want to run wires from my bank just to run two porch lights.

HD has one cold-cathode cfl that uses 5 watts. They are candelabra based with an Edison base adapter. They look like chandelier bulb replacements, since they are dimmable. Better still they have a rated life of 20k hours and cost the same as a regular cfl ($13 for a 2-pack).

The Phillips light has a special twist-lock base for lamps it uses, but the base is simply held with two very small screws. I replaced it with a ceramic lamp base intended for a floor lamp. The ceramic base has wires attached already and costs $3, so the cost per fixture to mod is only $10 total, and no drilling or cutting is needed.

The two thumbnails pix are before and after. The full sized pix are at the links below.





http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj62/dnix71/IMG_0153.jpg?t=1278344890

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj62/dnix71/IMG_0154.jpg?t=1278344890

The 5 watt fixture is nowhere as bright as the 13 watt original, but it works just fine for what I need and if the lamp actually lasts 20k hours as claimed it will be a long long long time before I need to think about this again.

[kurt]

my parents had 2 floro porch lights on there house before cfl's really became widely available these were on at dusk off at dawn 15w floro lights but the tubes were shaped like a U and the tubes were separate from the ballast. and those things were pretty bright they light up the yard really well. only problem with them was when it got colder than 0 f out they flickered on and off. i think with the modern cfl they trade some light output in order to make them small.

[dnix71]

Kurt, the u-shaped tubes are called biax. That's the style used by the discontinued Lights of America brand. Those are amazingly bright for their power consumption, but the control circuit is poorly designed. The LOA fixtures are "wet location" rated but fail badly in actual wet locations.

The pic below is the modded Phillips fixture with the 5 watt cold cathode candelabra lamp taken at 7:15pm EDT. Not as bright, but it does what it's supposed to, light the door at night. The stain down the wall is from decomposing leaves on the roof leaking past a rain deflector. The roof valley goes Niagra Falls when it rains and it would flood the fixture, otherwise.

I estimated 14 hours on each day even in the summer here in Florida. It's been overcast and raining the whole 4th of July weekend. This door faces east. The other light in on the back wall facing west. The Gulf of Mexico is dangerously warm now. It's 85F except right along the Louisiana coast where it's 87F. Any depression that wanders in will get big and mean if it stays long. Right now we in south Florida are wedged between two lows, one about to hit Terrebonne, Louisiana and the other coming off the Yucatan. My garden needed the rain, so I can't complain. My batteries won't hit float until the weather clears up.



http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj62/dnix71/IMG_0155.jpg   click this for a full sized pic.