According to state and/or Federal regulations, if you're driving with a tail light with one burned out LED, do you deserve a ticket, even if you still have a lot of light?
Sometimes what appears to be redundancy actually increases the failure rate.
Umm... you know boats and I don't, but when talking about automotive taillights he's exactly correct.
No... exactly correct for autos.
This I can readily believe -- but that's absolutely not what the automotive "replacements" that try to drop a bunch of LEDs in to replace an 1157 are like.
Probably not. I wouldn't be at all surprised if my tailights far exceed the minimum requirements, so that losing a number of elements would still leave me with more than is required. Very unlike an incandescent tail light that if it loses one lamp, goes completely dark.
I'm sure you have noticed that the tail lights on cars vary greatly in size. The DOT specifies a MINIMUM size and brightness.
I assume that makes for less problems with galvanic loss of any metal in contact with the water. I've been told (don't know how true it is) that boats comnnected to shore power need some sort of sacrificial anode. True or legend?
Aha! I knew there was a reason I never took up sailing. :^)
Huge. Designing fire alarm systems, we become accustomed to considering every small drain on power because they have to be able to operate on backup battery alone for 24 hours (in some cases 72 hours) and then run all sirens, strobes, etc., for 15 minutes. Every small add-on impacts the battery requirements.
I started using them a while ago and they serve well enough for everything except my PC desks. There I use incandescant lights. Since I work online as much as 12 or 14 hours some days I afford myself the "luxury" of incandescant lighting. I have a number of recessed can fistures in the ceilings, which are
12 and 14 feet high in most of the house. Bulb replacement is a royal PITA with those so any time one goes out it gets a CFL.We have a pool pump running 8 to 10 hours a day, two freezers, two refrigerators, two central AC systems and, until recently, as many as 5 PC's running for at least 8 hours a day. Somehow I don't hink I'll be able to get a rebate on my FPL bill. Maybe they'll offer me stock in the company though. :^)
That depends on the circumstances. On the NJ Turnpike most people won't even be stopped. If the driver happens to be black or brown, it's an arrest offense, including a felony stop as in, "Driver! Exit the vee-hick-al and step backward toward me with your hands in the air..." all of this at gunpoint. :^(
Sorry, but he's not
No, not correct for autos.
We are not talking about the cheap chinese 1157 replacements.
I have a car that came from the factory with LED tail light/brake lights. Trust me, they are a lot more visible from any angle then any incandescent tailight you have ever encountered.
Even boats not connected to shore power need sacrificial anodes.
Sometimes, if there is a problem in a Marina's wiring, serious damage can happen VERY quickly. Imagine what happened if a bronze thruhull gets eaten. Your boat sinks!
It is also possible to be electrocuted swimming near marina docks with shore power issues.
It is exactly what I like about sailing. If I wanted it to be just like home, I could save a lot of money by... staying home!
I'm currently looking into installing a geothermal system for heating and cooling my house. My boiler will be nearing it's expected service life end in about 4 or 5 years. Since I would be paying to replace that at that time anyway, it helps make the numbers work very well. Replacing it earlier would not be nearly as cost effective. What I would pay for a new boiler and central air is about half of the total cost for the geothermal system. Then of course, there are all sorts of rebates, tax credits and "green" programs to cut the cost even further.
A taillight engineered around an LED array can work at least as well as incandescents, with all the longevity and energy savings of LEDs. I can also believe in an LED array engineered to fit behind a particular existing lens, which would also work as well, though I've never seen it. But this discussion started (when I brought up the topic) with drop-in retrofits for auto taillights -- ie cheap Chinese 1157 "replacements".
And those fail for all the reasons that have been quoted enough times in this discussion that I snipped them this time.
If you look around a little more thoroughly, you will find drop in replacements that DO work well.
They exist.
This appears to be an article written as a student project.
There is an interesting one liner at the end, giving lumens per watt of a laser at about 700. Dunno where that data came from.
I have seen circuit-board type retrofits for Studebaker Avantis (notorious for dim, hard to see taillights even when everything is in as-new shape) and they work really well. Unfortunately I have a '55 coupe which has the same issue but there is no ready-made retrofit kit.
I'm thinking of perhaps taking some of the "truck-lite" oval taillights and busting them apart and seeing if that works better. Only thing I've tried that provides acceptable lighting in those taillights so far are halogen bulbs (which I don't like for heat reasons) and one set of LED "bulbs" that I got from DealExtreme that use three high-output LEDs rather than the usual array of cheap crappy LEDs. Unfortunately for those wanting a "drop in" replacement, I suspect that those particular "bulbs" will only work well in a light designed with a Fresnel type lens, and not one relying on the reflector for its optical characteristics. Even worse; one of them has already fallen apart.
If an LED "bulb" were available that would work well in reflector-type optics and would fit the same form factor as a typical 1034, 1157, P21/5W or single filament equivalent, I would be really happy. I sure wouldn't mind having LED lighting on the rear of my Porsche 944, but that uses a molded-together type lens/reflector assembly where the bulbs are inserted through little holes in the rear, so it's damn near impossible to implement a circuit board type retrofit there (OK, not impossible, but it would be an ambitious project, esp. considering that there's five different segments in each taillight - three red, one amber, one white (stop, tail, and rear fog are discrete segments) and I just don't have enough free time to build such a taillight, and I doubt the results would be worth it even though they'd be quite cool.
As I posted before, I tried some that looked like this:
these are the ones that worked well in my '55 (Fresnel type lens) but fell apart:
Nothing yet that I can recommend as a plug 'n' play for most people in an average car.
I haven't tried the SMD type "bulbs" yet but at $20 a pop and me expecting to be disappointed, I'm hoping that someone else will try them first and let me know :)
nate
Link? I've been waiting for years for someone to recommend a good one and have seen lots of websites and hype but not one person who's been able to say "I used this particular product, and it's as bright as a
1157 and works well."nate
Compared to incandescents, in USA on average CFLs actually reduce mining of mercury-containing materials and transfering mercury to the environment. This is because about half of all electricity produced in the USA is obtained by burning coal, a major source of mercury pollution.
LEDs are better once they become sufficiently cost-effective and cost-effectively improve upon CFLs in energy efficiency and do so in versions with similarly warm color high color rendering index light. Until then, mercury is a good reason to use CFLs instead of incandescents.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
This was a legal question, not a technical one. The laws tend to be written to make it easy to write tickets. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a maximum of 0 dead lights regardless of whether you could get it certified if you simply removed all the dead lights. The history of single incandescent bulbs that die and leave you with no light makes it more likely that "driving with a dead tail light" is a ticketable offense with 1 dead LED and 99 working ones. This more likely comes from the state vehicle code, not the DOT which is more aiming its regulations at manufacturers, but you're still stuck with both sets of rules.
I seem to recall that there are FAA regulations that you have to have at least two independent methods of measuring (I forget, this may have been altitude or airspeed) but if you add a GPS unit, you now have three methods of measuring . But you can't take off unless *all* of them are working, so adding the GPS just added another point of failure.
Assume that a tail light setup was certified to be 25% more than sufficiently bright with 100 LEDs. It is likely to be ticket-worthy if there's one dead light. It may be ticket-worthy if there are
101 working LEDs and one dead one. It might be ticket-worthy if there are 101 working LEDs and no dead ones and it wasn't re-certified.I'll ask the same question about boats, which one poster said had very strict regulations. Can you get your setup certified if you have a dead light in it (without removing the dead one)? If you got your setup certified with N lights (N is, say, around 100) with a 25% margin over minimum lighting intensity, and one of N burns out, is that acceptable without re-certification (or fixing the dead one)?
That is correct but if you're trying to convince Bobby Green, forget it. He began with the premises that CFL's are bad and refuses to see anything that proves otherwise. That "dining room table" phrase comes to mind.
True. All of the evidence supports that.
It's been a long time since I read the FARs but I can tell you this much. It's a lot more "interesting" making a anding without electrical power to the instrument panel. On a flight with my CFI years ago we were returning to SRQ (Sarasota) when a fuse blew. Then we noticed a faint smell of somethying electrical burning. There was no visible smoke and everything that doesn't need electricity worked. Strangely, the radios also worked.
In order to land at SRQ you usually approach from the North and have to fly briefly into Tampa International's airspace. Tampa's controllers get pretty busy and often tell GA pilots to stand by. That afternoon was no exception.
After a couple of minutes I called them again. Same answer.
I replied "Cessna ***** standing by with electrical failure and odor of smoke in airplane."
They took care of us really fast. We landed without incident, taxied to the shop and walked away (definition of a good landing). The A&P guy found a short, fixed it and said all was well. Next time we flew that airplane, we lost electrical power to the panel again. Shortly after that I had to stop due to health issues. I assume they finally got things straightened out.
First the cop has to see the one dead LED. Then he has to be the one moron in twenty who would ticket you for it. Of course, with my luck... :^)
Doh! Make that "premise" -- not premises. :^)
Robert
As with automotive lamps, the specifications for boats do not stiplulate how many elements are in the fixture or how many are lit. All that is required to be legal is to have the minimum specified illumination, and in the case of automobile tailights, there is also a requirement of the size of surface area exposed. If you have an array of 100 LED's and 50 are not lit, you are still legal in both an automobile and a boat as long as you still meet the minimum specifications.
If there is a spec of dust on the lens of your tailight will you get a ticket?
Furthermore, CFLs emit less UV than is found in even a similar quantity of daylight that has passed through a window.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Hmmm, Old/little knowledge is worse than lack of knowledge. How about vitamin D then? Auro immune disease did not happen over night. When it was coming with all kinds of signal/symptoms, I wonder what people did to prevent it.
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