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Where Have You Found LED Holiday Lights?
glassware asks: "Perhaps you know that LED holiday Lights last hundreds of times longer than regular lights. Perhaps you know that your local utility company recommends them for drastically lowering your electricity bill. But my real problem is, where can you find them? I've found lousy battery-operated LED lights in some department stores; but even in the best stores I give up after a half hour of searching, and so far I see only one vendor making them. Surely there must be alternatives. Where do you get your LED holiday lights?"
Here...Ya lazy bastard
I mean really. This isn't very askslashdot....it's more like AskGoogle -> "led holiday lights".
Duh.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I know that we are really starting to venture into "off-topic" land here, but these lights for your bike wheels look really cool. I don't have any first hand experience using them, but if you're looking to spend some money lighting up your bike, then this might be an investment...
Doh!
Here's their page on LED xmas lights.
"Suggested Retail" is $11.95 per string. Case-lot discounts begin at 24 strings.
Just FYI, of course. I'm not trying to advertise here, just inform. Many electrical supply houses (where the real electricians buy stuff) are National Specialty Lighting dealers. You might try one of them.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Search engines have supported quoted phrase searching for quite some time now. I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about it (or have failed to read any searching tip/faq page, such as Google's).
Send me an RFQ. Spec the desired length, spacing, colors, diffuse or water-clear, and pattern. I will reply with a quote for manufacture. LED terminals protected with heatshrink tubing. Blue LEDs will cost approximately ten times more, a bipolar set with alternate LEDs blinking from red to green will be about twice cost of steady-glow or alternate-blink.
...
Forever Bright is really the only way to go.
They have a patent on the system they use that
doesn't require a transformer and can be strung
end to end. Here's the response I got from
sales@foreverbright.com
All of the retailers listed on our Website
carry our product line, but they did not stock
all locations. This left retail availability
very poor in some areas and many consumers
frustrated.
We're trying hard to convince them to stock all locations as consumer demand for our products
is very high. It often helps when consumers
tell retail store managers they're looking for
a particular product or brand. The managers
report the requests to corporate offices for
future inventory considerations.
Raley's Drugs stocked the Forever Bright line
in all of their locations and we believe they
may have stores in your area. American home
hardware may also be worth a try. Sorry, we
can't sell direct.
Thank you for taking the time to write us.
Happy holidays,
Dave at Forever Bright
...for this purpose.
Yes, he's saying he's only found one vendor that makes them, BUT HE'S ASKING IF ANYONE KNOWS OF ANY OTHERS!!!
I don't know of any others. And I can't imagine that, for the moment, there will be too many of them.
Listen, here's the problem. I love LEDs, but with current technology, they're not really appropriate for this application.
First off, let me state that, for Christmas lights, tungsten bulbs - especially parallel-wired with 120V bulbs - are a huge improvement over the previous tradition of candles in the Christmas tree. But they're still not a great idea:
An alternative would be gas discharge lamps, like those little flicker-flame neons. But they're not without their flaws:
LEDs are a great idea, since they run cool. They're commonly available in a bunch of colors, and with triple-die LEDs, the lights could literally be any color and could change on-the-fly. But there's a downside:
Sure, LEDs are cheap, but they're still an order of magnitude more expensive that the little miniature lights on those cheap Made In Bangladesh light strings. Most people won't pay the extra, will they? (If in doubt about whether consumers know or appreciate quality, consider again VHS versus Betamax, or Microsoft versus Apple.)
The transformer or switching supply would absolutely constitute a benefit to consumers, in that it would virtually eliminate the possibility of getting a shock off the string. But try to explain it to consumers: "Point the mouse at the little picture of a computer on your screen. Click twice quickly." "Stop it! You're being too technical!" Therefore, it would really only become an extra burden to manufacturers.
Dim. LEDs are a hell of a lot brighter than they were a few years ago, and while they throw out a lot of light, it's over a fairly small viewing angle (typically under 45 degrees). The net output is miniscule compared to a tungsten bulb. Most LEDs can't even be seen to be lit in direct sunlight - but even my miniature light set is clearly visibly on.
Viewing angle is small. Readily available high-intensity LEDs are generally meant for automotive taillight and traffic signalling duty. They usually only have a viewing angle of 12.5 degrees. Your tree will look pretty dark if each light is only visible for 12.5 degrees of a walkaround.
How could this be solved? Maybe clear LEDs with frosted housings in order to make the light diffuse over the entire surface of the LED? Good idea, but it's still not bright enough to be satisfactory for that purpose. Nor does the frosting, in practice, diffuse light as evenly as you would want.
My perspective? I love LEDs. They're my favorite modern electronic component. (Second is probably the MOSFET. Overall favorite is vacuum tubes.)
I've got a 1960s or early 1970s Sound A-5000 power amplifier (try doing a Google search for that! Anyone got any info on the amp, e-mail me) which blew its tungsten pilot light. The light was a GE #47 - 6V, 150mA pilot light. Consumes 0.9W off the amp's low voltage supply to light up a dim red indicator on the front panel.
So I took a traffic duty red LED that I had kicking around. Clusters of these are used to make brake lights and traffic lights. The LED is rated for 3,000MCD at 12.5 degrees with a forward voltage drop of 2.1V and a peak current of 30mA.
The resistor was calculated as follows: Vin-Vdrop = 6.3V - 2.1V = 4.2V. R = E/I = 4.2V/0.03A = 140 ohms. Next standard value is 150 ohms, and I used that. When I measured the current through the LED, it was (unsurprisingly) 28mA, 93% of the LED's rated maximum. The forward voltage drop was 2.1 volts. The LED is being driven harder than I would like, and it gets warm after a few minutes.
Even so, the dim red indicator on the front panel is still dim. Right on axis, it'll blind you, but from any other angle, the indicator is still too dim to be useful. Improvements were made by actually grinding down the end of the LED and using clear hot-melt glue to attach it to the back of the bezel, but it would still be unacceptably dim on a finished product. Certainly dimmer than the old GE #47 was, not even as bright as the panel LED on the front of my Viewsonic. And that's with a traffic duty LED, pushed hard.
In summary, naked LEDs are great when viewed on axis, used as indicators or when a fine shaft of light is required. But trying to diffuse them or expect behavior similar to an incandescent bulb is still pushing things... for the moment.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Ehh, try this Vendor List instead, since the link doesn't format correctly when I post it as plain text. *hint hint*
Ouch! The truth hurts!