Hi all,
The whole point of this is to use some of my battery bank energy that normally (for me ) goes unused in the winter. I decide to start using some of it for landscape lighting, in this case a pole light in front of the house. I've tried commercial (eBay) LED lamps, HF 5W CFLs , but the last was a corn/tower style SMD LED light bulb off of eBay (5W SMD 36 LEDs). It did OK job, but I wanted brighter. I couldn't find anything (OK there are probably some CFL's but I was stuck on LEDs for some reason), with more than 36 LEDs that I could use in my configuration (12V, and I wanted to keep using an E27 base).
The problem is the idea stuck in my head and I could not get rid of it, so I guess I had to, just to do it.
The final result was this... on the left is my bulb, on the right the 36 LED commercial unit. Mine has 56 SMD LEDs (5050 , 6000K), draws ~ 14 W.
I started with some rigid led strips, 60/meter in 2 1/2 meter strips. I'm using a 2" diameter PVC pipe as the form , and the E27 base off of a burned out 30W 110V CFL
This is the assembly, strip cut into 4 LED lengths and crazy glued to the pipe. I had soldered wires to each strip )kinda looks like a very small ECM rewire
)
Finally powered up. In a subjective comparison to the 36 LED bulb purchased , this one was substantially brighter, more than expected. Also note that I had planned on 60 LEDs but ran into a cutting issue on the strips and had to drop 4 LEDs
I have the bulb mounted outside now, unfortunately this are not considered weatherproof and I should probably coat the bulb with something, I'm thinking either clear casting epoxy or just spraying with urethane.. any thoughts?