A New Light Has Come Upon The Scene

Yes it is amazing. I changed my lights in my laundry room and microwave room and it lit up the rooms.

I changed out the fixtures in my train room 4 years ago and it went from this

To this

The room is so much brighter now.  

NWL

DMASSO,

You have a room dedicated to microwaving?

Hal

These sound like the same one BJs sells around here. I put them in my unheated barn and as they say it was like night and day. The added bonus in the cold winter they don't buzz and they light instantly. The downside is you want to put them where they are low enough to avoid direct eye contact like sitting in a high ceiling room. The light is not diffused. 

Pete

There are some really nice LED 2x2 and 2x4 foot panels for suspended ceilings. The units have adjustable color  temperatures too (ie: 2700, 3000, 4000, 5000k). I’m sold. I currently  have two fluorescent fixtures that use a total of 320 watts.

The new panels will throw far more light at 1/4 of the watts.

LED’s are great for Grandpa eyes. 🤓

@kmacleod posted:

There are some really nice LED 2x2 and 2x4 foot panels for suspended ceilings. The units have adjustable color  temperatures too (ie: 2700, 3000, 4000, 5000k). I’m sold. I currently  have two fluorescent fixtures that use a total of 320 watts.

The new panels will throw far more light at 1/4 of the watts.

 

Yes, I used the 2x4 foot fixtures in my train room to replace the older fluorescent fixtures.  Some of the newer fixtures are c. 1 inch thick, except for the control box.  The can also be installed so that they can be dimmed, but I did not do that with my lights.

Rather than going with cheap Menards fixtures, I went with fixtures from Econolight.com.  They were a bit more expensive, but one gets what one pays for.  Here is a picture of the actual lights in the room.

NWL

They have replacement LED tubes for the fluorescent tubes.  They have ones that can run with a ballasted fixture so you don't have to modify the fixture.  I went for the ones that you have to bypass the ballast.  Simple rewiring.

Brendan

Is there a "Kelvin Table" which tells you x Kelvin = white, warm white, blue warm light....?

Here ya go...

From Lumens.com.

When lighting your layouts, you should look for "Warm White" LEDs in the 2,700 to 3,200 K range. The "bluish" light of the 4,000K and higher LEDs are perceived to be a bit brighter, but they give a "cold" look to your colors on the layout. Here are four examples of different color temperatures, from the images in Jim Barrett's "Backshop" column in Run 311.

Those pictures show why I went with incandescent lighting in my all purpose/train room.  This was ten years ago and LED were not adjustable and fluorescent was too blue.

I do not plan on changing them.  These lights are on mostly when running trains which is not that many hours per year.  A floor lamp is on mostly for other functions.

The hours the light are used on cost of operation can be way more important than the watt rating of bulbs.  I have hundreds of watts of attic and outside flood (with motion and day/nite control) incandescent lights which are not on for an hour or two per year.

Charlie

Charlie, you can now duplicate the warm white color of incandescent lights with LEDs. Ten years ago that was not possible, but now it is.

LEDs consume only about 10% of the power of equally sized incandescent lamp. Big savings there, plus they never burn out.

@Brendan posted:

They have replacement LED tubes for the fluorescent tubes.  They have ones that can run with a ballasted fixture so you don't have to modify the fixture.  I went for the ones that you have to bypass the ballast.  Simple rewiring.

Brendan

I've done this and am very happy

If you use the lights a lot, the electrical savings can be startling.

Last year I replaced every lamp in our "Land Yacht" (including fluorescent tubes) with LED lights. These are all 12-volt DC lighting fixtures.

The drop in power consumption was amazing! The coach has a digital current monitor that shows me how many amps are being drawn from the 12 volt house batteries at any given moment. After the conversion, I could turn on every light in the coach, and the power consumption was less than the power drawn by just the four fluorescent fixtures in the living room prior to the conversion.

We changed every light in out house to LED most in the 2600K area and our electric bill went from over $500 a month to about $300. I changed the fluorescent tubes in the train room (garage) a couple of years ago. Yes Hawaii has the highest power charges in the country because we generate most of electricity form diesel generators. The pool pumps are our biggest expense now and I will change those to variable speed pumps as ours die. Don