IMHO some of these are so bright that they are a hazard themselves. Having someone behind you with a 4x4 with a pair of these plus dipped lights mounted so high in the air that they shine into the back window does not help my concentration.
Andy
But do they address the "easy change", "inbuilt backup", or "15 y MTBF" requirement?
Or, another possibility, accurate failure prediction (maybe LED operating temps rise in a recognisable way, or the amount of light drops, or some such) - so you get a lamp life equivalent of a fuel gauge.
I agree about the excess brightness. The idea of a marker light is right
- the implementation not ideal.
Not helped by the LED brightness being able to be tweaked with an OBD-II lead in many cases ...
I find the newer emergency vehicles that are fitted with blue/white strobes are far too bright, I generally reckon I see or hear blues&twos a lot further off than other drivers, these ones are almost blinding when they get up close, to the point the strobes completely mask their indicators, so you can't get out of their way as you don't know which way they're trying to go.
And while we're griping about lights, if you want to make signals as clear to see as possible, why not keep indicators *apart* from stop/tail lamps, rather than surrounding orange with a ring of red?
A LED array with one or two LEDs down may look cosmetically bad but still performs with >80% its nominal output.
An LED based high power lamp will always (at least for the forseeable future) be a composite of 7W or 10W components on a heatsink. As such a single point failure of the entire array is quite unlikely. However, starter motor transients do provide a rather unpleasant back emf which might be deleterious to them if they are on at the time.
Certain headlamp assemblies seem designed to be more or less impossible to service on your own or in the dark. I guess to generate revenue...
I was recently caught out by a new LED nominally 60W bulb put in to replace an old CFL that was getting a bit dim on a stairwell. The new unit was *too* bright which is a first with green energy saving lamps!
The buses round here have LEDs for their rear light clusters, they seem to be down to somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the individual elements working after a few years.
Then change to a decent insurance company.
Halogen? Surely you'd have been using HMI before changing to LED? And what is the life of these LEDs?
It's not usually the headlight assembly itself, but how it is packaged into the car. The normal problem is lack of clearance to get at it.
John Williamson put finger to keyboard:
Prior to the rules change they weren't an MOT testable item though.
On Monday 25 March 2013 10:27 Andy Burns wrote in uk.d-i-y:
That's going to be a challenge for the MOT - "is it working or broken"?
My SD1 had originally just very small tail lights - the rest of the red part of the cluster being rear fogs and stop lights. I replaced both the fog and stop lights with double filament lamps to give a much larger area of tail lights - now 3 x 5 watt lamps per side. And at an MOT, it failed on one of these having failed. ;-) (couple of other things too)
absolutely correct, but how many on this NG know about HDMI? And in the case of our amateur theatre, we might miss out the HDMI stage anyway.
I don't know about life, probably better than the 100 hours of HDMI or halogen theatre lamps.
H? What does that H stand for? Dunno. Ah! Hydrargyrum. Phew - at least that's not mercury.
And I really don't want to watch video on headlamps. :-)
(I know that was a type/bad autocorrect.)
But you specifically mentioned theatre lighting and spotlights. HMI has been in use in film etc for over 30 years. Other types of discharge luminaries for even longer.
'Probably' is what everyone seems to say about LEDs, since the indicator one on their Hi-Fi, etc, works for ever. But power LEDs seem to be a very different matter.
Provided they are on an adequate heatsink and not subject to gratuitous electrical abuse by over voltage then they should last pretty well when compared to filament bulbs. The catch is that many lamp fittings are not amenable to taking an LED substitute bulb. LED luminaires need to be redesigned from scratch to take advantage of their properties.
Getting the relatively small amoubt of waste heat away without cooking the electronics or the plastic and phosphor near the emitter is tricky.
They are incredibly good for "please don't hit me" signs on motoerways because the self collimated nature of the package gives a beam that goes far into the distance without being dazzling close too & off axis.
In the immortal words of PC plod - "just drive down the road son and see if I give you a ticket"
"It was all right when I set off" is I think an accepted excuse. You will if pulled up normally get a ticket which requires you to get it fixed and report it to a police station within a specified time - can't remember exactly.
Does AA recovery cover a failed bulb ?
ISTR Renault Meganes for one, require removal of the wheel and wheel arch liner to replace a bulb.
I contend it has little or no impact on accidents or injuries and is yet another ineffective financial burden for no return.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.