Here’s a cheap gift to give someone for Christmas. LED lights for car interior are great. They are cheap (About a dollar), brighter, use less power, less heat, and are whiter. I bought some from Amazon where I got a 10 pack for $7. Very easy to replace. Just pop out the plastic and pop in the new bulb. The above picture shows the one on the left is the LED and the right is original.
LEDs are polarized so if you put it in backward it won’t light. Just turn it around. You need to match the bulb size which you can do by looking up your car online. Generally just match the length like 31 MM or 42 MM.
How about a link to your purchased item? I search Amazon and find a bunch of colored lights that illuminate the underside of the vehicle.
Led lights are the future for a greener world, a necessasity that must be handed over to legacy,
it also saves our present by both CO2 reduction and Huge reduction on monthly bills.
As estimated approximately 90% reduction in electric bills and huge savings.
Google Festoon Dome Light led
cool
This is GREAT! Because we all know how conserving energy is a “good thing.” But we often forget at what COST!
Once you convert your old gas guzzler to use more efficient LED’s you may have an even bigger problem potentially BLOWING OUT THE VEHICLES ELECTRICAL SYSTEM! Although I will agree that it’s not very likely since a simple overhead LED light is a relatively small change that’s not likely going to do too much. And it’s also not as likely that a bad LED is going to short circuit like a traditional bulb might either. But let’s not forget that your current vehicle’s electrical system was designed to use those old inefficient incandescent bulbs, motors and other more “resistive” devices known as “loads”.
Remember ohms law where E=I*R? (Ask an electrician if you don’t know it. And if you are one, try remembering Kirchoff’s voltage law and/or Thevenin’s theorem.)
Now, if you change “R” with less/more resistive loads like LED’s… Hmmm… It’s starting to sounds a little like a conspiracy to get us to buy newer vehicles once we “fix” something that isn’t really broken.
But again, switching over to LED’s isn’t very likely going to do too much to a CAR – or even a HOUSE (where it’s an entirely different kind of electrical source). However, if you drive/ride something smaller like a motorcycle, moped, or even an electric vehicle (which may not have this problem since nearly all of them already have LED’s), changing over to LED’s is definitely something to reconsider.
Sure! LED’s are often brighter and you don’t have to change them out like, EVER! But the question you might really want to ask is at what COST?!
…And personally, I’m not so sure I’d even want a brighter light like that right in my face while trying to look away from the road. (BAM!) I mean, who uses traditional maps these days, anyway?
I am an electrician, and LEDs have a much higher resistance, not lower. They limit current flow. The lower current used would never damage your car’s electrical system. In the unlikely event that the LED is defective, and causes a short circuit, the worst that will happen is it will blow out a fuse under your dash, pretty easy fix, and much more likely to happen with a standard incandescent bulb. I think you are being a little hysterical about this here. A 12Volt battery circuit is not a highly technical engineered. Cars have some of the simplest basic DC electric circuits I can imagine.
He may have ‘resistance’ confused with reactance — a valid concern when replacing incadecent with compact florescent lamps. Of course, LEDs are not CFLs.
It’s an easy mistake for some without formal education — I myself am only aware that the rice crispies at the top of the bowl dry out faster because they are closer to the sun thanks to the tuteladge of learned and dedicated individuals such as George Carlin.
Sorry Tim, but it seems no one but you is confusing reactance with resistance!
Both types of Reactance have time or ƒ (Frequency) in Hertz, (Hz) in their equations. Why, because; reactance is an AC or transient current phenomenon.
For all practical purposes, a cars DC circuit such as it cabin light contains only resistance. There is negligible parasitic capacitance and inductance to be concerned with meanwhile circuit resistance predominates.
I am not an electrician, but I do know ohms law, A/C theory and that NikElectric is correct!
Remember Occam’s Razor; Keep It Simple!
Marc Perkel, nice shameless plug for Amazon LED bulbs. Amazon recognizes it’s friends and rewards well. The ck is in the mail.
As we leave the age of the incandescent bulb here’s a question or two about incandescents.
Which will last longer, a 100 watt 12 volt bulb or a 100 watt 120 volt bulb?
Why are airport runway lights specified in amps instead of volts?
Let me take a guess … You are a stern Republican Conservative, who just knows the Liberal Progressive is out to destroy the U.S.?
“Show me a man’s light bulb and I’ll tell you ….”
“Remember ohms law where E=I*R? (Ask an electrician if you don’t know it. And if you are one, try remembering Kirchoff’s voltage law and/or Thevenin’s theorem.)
Now, if you change “R” with less/more resistive loads like LED’s… Hmmm… It’s starting to sounds a little like a conspiracy”
Quoting the Ohm’s law formula doesn’t make you an electrician. I don’t think you have a slightest idea what you are talking about and you should not be anywhere near electrical circuits. Listen to NikElectric, he is right.
Great idea, actually ! In addition to better lighting, I’ve had to jump my car twice because I left the incandescent interior light on both times.
I kind of like the warm, cosy glow a flickering incandescent bulb makes just as the battery is about to run flat.
The ultimate cheapskate gift!
Here are a few LED gift ideas for the ultimate cheapskate …
LED Gift Ideas
LEDs are awesome.
Maybe someone here knows something about this. My best googling efforts have not revealed how an individual can construct one from raw materials at their work bench.
I thought you Teapublicans wanted to impeach Obama for the incandescent light ban? Now you want to design one from scratch?
Dallas style reasoning:
1) remember everything someone said against their religiously held D beliefs
2) forget everything that same person said against Rs
3) conclude that person is R
Somebody may, in time, come up with a simple formula for a DIY homebrew LED — Probably more like the OLEDs or a mix similar to those ‘glowsticks’ but re-invigorate with applied electric field.
Otherwise, it’s probably more wide-knowledge-base and equipment than most single individuals are able to accomplish. I did make a ‘demonstration’ diode in lab once — a silicon wafer, a vacuume chamber, a tungsten bowl with 900 amperes of current flowing through it to vaporize the gold for deposition onto the wafer, and ten minutes ‘tickling’ the junctions to find a ‘sensitive’ spot.
There are (or at least were) some cars out there where the owner wasn’t trusted to even replace a bulb, and forget about a car phone or something like that, without using “their” parts.
Apparently they’d tied the computer(s) with the electrical system….
For most of us, though, a LED light in a car won’t hurt anything unless somebody was nice enough to design in a “burned out courtesy light” signal for a dashboard display.
I’m not sure if either of my cars is using that type of bulb, though – sort of a “fuse holder” setup. Guess I could look.
“A LED car light! Gee, thanks honey!”
/sarcasm
I bought 4 different style LEDs to replace all the lights on my travel trailer. If you are “primitive” camping the battery will last a lot longer.
Got 90 of them off Ebay for $30 or so with free shipping.
It’s good see the LED bulb market penetration has reached the trailer park community. This is very encouraging and helps with Obama’s energy independence goals.
This should also keep your trailer cooler in the summer.
My car’s electronics, lights and then dims out the ceiling light, after the ignition is shut off. That electronic dimmer is designed for the old incandescent bulbs. I don’t know how it will react to an array of LEDs. While LEDs will dim, as current drops. Unlike CFLs. The controling circuit might become imbalanced, if it’s expecting to see a specific resistance of a filament. Rather than a bipolar device, that has a different resistance curve.
And LEDs can generate heat. Play around with one of those cheap Laser pointers, made for key chains. And you’ll feel they warm up in about a minute. Either it’s the laser LED, or the small batteries providing a near shorted current. Something has got to heat up. If not the LED bulb, then the wiring or the driver circuit chip, heats up in the car. Hopefully not destructively.
LED and Laser not even close to the same thing….
Well, except for a laser diode. That’s pretty close.
LEDs cannot be dimmed by the same circuit that dims a standard incandescent bulb. Limiting the DC current will either keep it the same or shut it off completely once it reaches the breakthrough point. Your claim that LEDs generate heat is way off base. There is virtually zero heat from an LED source. The only heat is what is being produced by smashing electrons around in the conductor. It will be the same temperature as the wire that is feeding it power. Since the current draw of an LED is almost nothing, the heat will also be almost nothing.
My lights dim too and the replacement LEDs dim as well. It works!
Too many engineer wannabes talking smack here!
I built a LED clock long ago and built in a simple night time dimming circuit that lowered the current through the LED.
Kudos to Marc Perkel for pointing out what should be common knowledge!
Gee, doesn’t any one build hobby circuits anymore? Everyone is to busy looking gaga at their smart phones. Seems phone are getting smarter while people are getting dumber!
Duh, LED do dim as voltage across them is reduced!
Car wiring is designed to carry current for hot filament bulbs! In the future, that may change with new Cars using only LEDs; makers will downsize the circuit current capabilities to cut cost. Then some idiot DU blogger will cripe about blowing fuses when replacing the cabin light with a hot filament bulb and begin again talking engineering wannabe smack!
Now a days we can use Led Lights for plants also..
This is helpful when the attic gets too warm.
Good thought Marc. I did the same, as I had a spare 3W halogen replacement lamp around. Brighter and cooler, though draws the same power as the original lamp.
as to airport lights being current rated it is simple, you have a lot of lights at one end, and a whole lot in a string along up to 12km of roadway where you need to have all of them at absolutely the same brightness, and where you need to be able to control them all at once, so you have a series string that has a rated current, so the cable voltage drop, which may be over 300V along the 20km of wire making the system, has absolutely no influence on the light output. Lamps have a shorting mechanism for when they burn out that shorts out the cable, and you simply have a single wire cable joining them all with one in and one out. All driven by a constant current transformer, which makes checking the system for faults easy as you just look at the voltage and can tell if lamps are blown and how many so you can simply change then during the weekly inspection needed. If you use regular cable it would be a 50mm or more cable per conductor, as opposed to a 2mm conductor.
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I also bought such a led lights as a gift for my family members, and they were more than happy. It is the best gift, in my opinion, if you have a car. I bought universal ones and I do not regret. Here you can see how they look like- Pigios automobiliu dalys
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I really love to read out your blog, i guess you have made huge researches about led bulbs and lights. keep it up.