lights for buildings

For general interior lighting, LED light strips are hard to beat. You can get a reel of 300 directly from Hong Kong for $13 and free shipping:

5M Flexible LED Strip

You can get them in several colors, and the strips are cuttable every 3 lights. They require 12VDC. They even come with peel-and-stick backs.

Just put a strip of them around the interior up by the rafters.

Hi Pete,

How do you connect the power to the cut pieces of the strip?

Joe

I like the led strips. I just ordered some. What do you use for a power supply? Anyone have a lead on cheap wire that would be suitable for this? I need to run a lead all the way around the layout to connect all the buildings and led strips to

quote:

Originally posted by davidbross:
What do you use for a power supply?

Look in that box of old power bricks you've been accumulating. 12VDC is fairly common. If not, I'm sure you can buy something at Radio Shack.

thanks guys for all the help im looking at the led strip i found one for $3.50 has 6 led and is all wired ready to hook up will handle up to 19 v

Roy just make sure you put dc not ac to them or someone here will know what to put in between to convert dc to ac

Avanti, that particular listing looks like it's for multi-color, is that right? Can you point us to a strip of only the warm-white?

Thanks!

John

quote:

Originally posted by JohnBoy:
Avanti, that particular listing looks like it's for multi-color, is that right? Can you point us to a strip of only the warm-white?

Thanks!

John

No. The website is a little chaotic, but I think they are single color. There is a pull-down just above the "buy it now" button that lets you select the color (including warm white). See also the note:

Friendly Notice: (Each 3528 Strip has only one Color, please choose 5050 RGB LED strip if you want multi colors in one LED strip with Control Panel)

Oh wow, thanks for pointing that out, it would have taken me a long time to see that drop-list.

John

Another thing that helps lighting a building is to rubber cement aluminum foil to the inside top of the room or building. It gives a nice even glow. I like mixing clear grain of wheat lights with orange for a warmer look. Don

We've also started using the LED strips with the peal and stick backing on our club layout with good results. They are 1000x better than the grain of wheat bulbs. You do need 12 VDC to power them and our layouts generally have AC power. We found that we can buy small voltage regulator circuits on Ebay for about $7 delivered. You hook up the input side to either AC or DC voltage. It will output a constant DC voltage even if the input voltage is changing. There is a small screw you turn to set the level of the output voltage. We've also used these to drive Miller Engineering signs with layout power and eliminated the battery pack.

Do you have a link to the voltage regulator circuits? Thanks,

Paul

roy below is my CUS that has LED lighting. The pictures were taken with various room light levels and some with flash.













The following are Grain of Wheat lighting as Alan Graziano talked about above.

Alan G
I've been trying to figure out how to put lighting on some of my projects
On the building with the red door right above,and some of the shell tanks
If you could explain it,How exactly did you make those lights,and with what part's
Thanks

Joe,
I described the parts I used above in this post. To make a light above a door, I would use a Plastruct LF-6 light cover with 3/32" plastruct tubing (TB-3). I would use a 12 volt grain of wheat bulb from Circuit Concepts. The light cover has to be drilled out for the 3/32" piping. I also bore out the light side of the cover with a 1/8" drill so the light tucks up into the cover. To bend the 3/32" piping, I use a bending jig.
You are close enough to come over and get a demonstration.

Alan Graziano

Thank's Alan
That's great!
I do want to get together with you this year some saturday,maybe some saturday afternoon in Feb,March or April.
Also hopefully sometime you could come down on a saturday afternoon and see my layout.I'm easier to get to than Joe's train station,Instead of getting off at Street road,you go down 4 more exit's to Bridge st. and I am at the bottom of the off ramp.
By the way,are you going to Trainstock in Paterson?
But once again,Thank's

I'm using 3MM round top warm white LED's .These were removed from Christmas lights

I like them because they give off an eyrie glow reminiscent of the woefully inefficient 250 watt incandescent bulbs used back in the 30's and 40's

Here's some on a coal tower and an Atlas switch tower (lower right hand corner of coal tower) and an Atlas station





David

The voltage regulator circuit I talked about can be found on Ebay. Here's one:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LM317-...&hash=item2308ccaed5

added Walther's Built Up's for my Woodland Senics Building: