Longtime readers (hi mum!) will remember my post about the butt-ugly diy bike light. I used a GU 5.3 20 Watt halogen bulb for awesome brightness, and a 7 Amp-hour sealed lead-acid battery to keep my awesomeness on the ground (it weighs in at about 5 kg, after all). This set-up gave me enough light so I only had to charge the battery only once a week, but I craved more!Enter the Paulmann high efficiency led. 3 Watts, same standard (GU 5.3), 653 candela - and 60 swiss francs. Ouch. With this my energy-consumption should go down by about a factor of five (now I have 20+1 Watt, with the new bulb 3+1 Watt), so I only have to charge once a month.
Installing was a jiffy thanks to my modular design, and here is the comparison of the beams:
They are a bit difficult to compare, since I did not take care when snapping the pictures. That being said, the led-beam is more focused, and thus seems brighter. Overall I think it produces actually less light (anyone know the respective lux ratings?), but it is should still be more than sufficient for me to see.Most importantly though, the 'eye' of my bike is now triangular, which is trice as good as before, somehow.
I also got some red leds for my backlight, which was a single one Watt white led "modified" with a red permanent marker until now...
Here is the result:
Last but not least, I had to change my back-tyre. From now on I will check the abrasive wear from time to time, to stop this from happening:
Thankfully my tyre deflated on the top of the hill, and not at the bottom - could have been embarrassing!
Cool, bike lights. I like the triangle myself and am already starting to replace some of my compact fluorescents in the house with LED bulbs.
ReplyDeleteBut the tyre, naughty. As a safety engineer, I have to say tsk tsk.
I know, I know... shame on me.
ReplyDeleteDo leds already make sense, economically? I had the impression that they were still too expensive, especially since the energy savings when compared to CFLs aren't as big as CFLs to incandescent bulbs.