Monday, February 25, 2013

Light It Up

I've never liked the 70's style light that Scamp installed in one corner of the dinette and in the loft. I spent a fair amount of time wandering the vendors in Quartzsite looking for a fixture that would tilt and swivel and not break the bank. Some exist, but $50 seems ludicrous for what should be a $15 dollar fixture.

BJ suggested we check at our local, hole-in-the-wall, RV Supply store where we found the Arcon 10649 swivel bullet light. Three of them came home with us. Unfortunately, they come with halogen bulbs with the G4 style base and in stock form draw 12.1 watts each.

A little Amazon research led me back to LEDwholesalers - we bought all our other LED lamps from them - who bailed us out with a 160 lumen MR11 style bulb that draws 1.9 watts and is significantly brighter than the stock halogen bulb.

Unfortunately, these lamps are a bit taller and require removing the plastic lens from the fixture, but since they put out so much light, most of the time they'll be pointed at the wall. These are the cool white lamps that I much prefer over the yellowish "warm" lamps.

I'm real happy with them! Even with the purchase of LED lamps in addition to the fixtures, they were notably more affordable than other fixtures.

Because I expected the 160 lumen bulb to be too bright for the loft, I also ordered a tower type bulb rated at 105 lumen from LEDwholesalers. It was only available in "warm" white which was less of a concern in the loft where it would be the only bulb and thus the color difference wouldn't be as noticeable. The pins did need to be trimmed shorter. It draws .9 watts.


Update - Feb. 28: I ordered another tower type bulb at the same time from Eversale via Amazon that would be brighter but may draw as much as 3.5 watts. In spite of paying Eversale shipping, the bulb took 9 days from time of order (almost exclusively shipping time), while the LEDwholesaler bulbs arrived in two days with free Amazon shipping.  The Eversale bulb is somewhat brighter than the LEDwholesalers similar shaped tower bulb but sticks out of the fixture about 1/4 inch.  While it's somewhat brighter, it draws 2.2 watts as compared to .9 watts in this installation and the combination of power draw and physical size puts it out of the running for our installation.

2 comments:

  1. How do you trim the pins without damaging the bulb. I am rather ignorant about adapting LED's to more conventional lighting.

    ReplyDelete