Heads up LED bulbs B&Q

I think the most annoying domestic device with illumination issues was a Pioneer receiver back in the 70s. Very good receiver, but who on earth decided to make the dial pointer a Perspex light pipe with a tiny wired in bulb on the top and put tine fuse like lights behind the blue dial? To get the pointer bulb out needed a soldering iron. I pretty soon tired of this and modified it to use an led. Same for the stereo light. But the dial lights I had to change every year or so, and this needed half the dial mechanism to be dismantled to get at the sockets for the bulbs. In the end I actually traced the supply to these bulbs and put two series diodes in series with it, which dropped it by a bit over a volt and hence they did not blow so often.

Brian

Its more than a light bulb its a fashion statement. Today I am going to illuminate my bathroom in shell pink and as the sun sets it will change to a golden yellow...

chuckle

Brian

I can think of lots of reasons why to use them. Last longer Less susceptible to damage through vibration. Run cooler so less chance of damage to the fitting. Use a lot less current, so leaving lights on less likely to flatten the battery.

HID like any decent discharge lamp is available in a range of colour temperature - actually for car use rather wider than LED.

Projector headlights allow a much sharper cut-off than plain reflector types. And is more tolerant of the type and size of light source. I found I got exactly the same beam pattern with halogen, HID and LED in the same lamp. HID, by the way, was the most powerful.

The snag with a sharp cutoff is if the car bounces on a pothole etc, the light as seen by oncoming traffic can go from little to a lot quickly.

As opposed to many reflector designs which merely annoy all the time. ;-)

Surprisingly LEDs are available in various powers. Same as tungsten.

LED is 3 or 4 times more efficient than even low voltage halogen.

The ones that use H4?

My tests were done with H7.