Cheap LED lighting.

mtdoc

Just a head's up. Harbor Freight has THIS large LED light bar on sale for $29.99.

It's designed for working under the hood of a car but it can easily mounted anywhere. I bought one and was surprised that it is pretty well made and puts out a lot of light for the price. It has a rechargable lithium battery but comes with both 120V and a 12 V adapters - so it would make a nice inexpensive LED lighting solution for off grid use - being able to be powered directly from 12V or through an inverter.

RandomJoe

Re: Cheap LED lighting.

Nice. I wonder how easily opened it is?

I bought a couple LED work lights at Westlake for $20 each or so some time back for similar reasons. The NiMH batteries in them were complete junk, and the design of the charging circuit was such that you couldn't power them off the 12V input. It would only charge the batteries when the light switch was off!

Those particular lights had screw-together sections on either end of the light bar, one I was able to "crack" open fairly easily (fortunately the first one), the second one took rather more force - more glue on the threads. I removed the battery pack in the handle, made a little 7.2V regulator to stick in there instead, and now it can take a wide range of voltages in (9-30V or so) to power the lamp. The switch selects between one row of 10 LEDs or the whole thing (3 rows / 30 LEDs), 100mA or 300mA input so can run a long time from a small AGM battery if need be. Very nice, aside from the extremely monochromatic color of the LEDs!

The LED board was wired with all the LEDs two-in-series and a small dropping resistor for each string (one set of 10 / 5 series strings in parallel). I couldn't get the LED board out of the clear tube without major surgery so just worked with that so I could reassemble them easily.

dolcesails

Re: Cheap LED lighting.

Check out www.tmart.com they have cheap led's..............