Are there any LED nightlight or LED replacement bulbs for a standard candelabra base nightlight that are actually as bright as a 7 watt incandescent, say 45 lumens? I’ve looked at a bunch of them, and most are rated at 1/4 to a 1/3 of a watt, and the only one that actually gave an output spec was 8 lumens. I’d think it would take a 1 or 2 watt LED to give an equivalent amount of light.
Similarly, what about landscape light bulbs (12 volt AC wedge base) that are an equivalent to 18 watts / 250 lumens. Again, most of the offerings seem to be underpowered. Car bulbs won’t work because they’re meant for 12 VAC.
These seem to me to be good places to switch to LEDs because I have a lot of them, they’re on a lot, and I don’t care about dimmability or light quality.
There are some very efficient high-brightness LEDs out there. Cree makes one that’s 130 lumens/Watt, so you could get 45 lumens with around 1/3 Watt. But, the cheeseball nightlight replacements are probably much less efficient.
I considered building my own by converting an incandescent housing to a 1 watt Luxeon star, but their don’t seem to be driver boards for them that can plug directly into the mains.
Anway, I found one that actually is bright enough, a Maxxima MLN-50, available from them and from Amazon. It’s .8 watt with 5 emitters. It throws too much light straight at the ceiling and will flash on if you walk by it in the hall, but overall it produces close to the 7 watts equivalent of light I need. Saving 6.2 watts may not seem like a big deal but I have 4 of them and they’re on most of the time.
Be alert when you’re ordering. Many LED bulbs that small are designed for 12 or 24 volt applications, and will blow up if you plug them into a wall socket.
You can always make your own driver; all you need is a constant-current power supply, preferably switchmode, which is easy to build with discrete parts or a dedicated chip (e.g. an integrated SMPS chip, as few as half a dozen external parts), basically instead of voltage feedback you have current feedback, can also be non–isolated if the light is enclosed. Of course, this all assumes you know how to build a SMPS in the first place (and one that is nice and neat; efficient and small), easy for me but likely not something many hobbyists can do.
Those 12 VAC landscape lights can also be converted to run on DC if you have access to the power adapter; 12 VDC will run incandescents the same as 12 VAC while enabling DC-powered lights to run; if the LED lights are just some LEDs and a resistor nothing bad will happen if you accidentally reverse them (easy way to check - apply 12 volts through a 1 k resistor (to limit current just in case) and measure the current draw either way, should be 0 when backwards).
I was very disappointed in the light output of the replacement LED nightlight bulbs I bought a month or so back. I’ve already dumped one of them for a standard incandescent. And even if I have to change them 5 times as often, it will still be cheaper. It’s quite aggravating that they put out crappy things like these. And don’t even get me started on CFL’s (aka crappy fucking lightbulbs).
LEDs send light out directionally. to get the same coverage as an incandescent bulb then you need to get the LED with a good diffuser and/or multiple LEDs. i’ve got some that are bright enough to read by, ones that illuminate a room well for navigation.
better so far are the light as a unit; i’ve got ones with jeweled and translucent diffusers. the replacement bulb LED don’t broadcast light well.
1 watt seems like a lot for a night light when I think of what that does in a flashlight. Does it have to be a replacement bulb? what about an entire fixture? You should be able to go to a box store and actually see the light they produce.
A flashlight you have optics designed to throw the light in a narrow beam in one direction. A nightlight you want it all directions to kind of light up the general area so I don’t think 1 watt would be excessive. I understand conceptionally what I wanted was the guts of a switching wall wart, and a driver board, but I couldn’t fit that in the guts of an incandescent nightlight, especially if I kept the existing photocell board. It might have been possible if I could design and fab my own circuit board, but that’s beyond my skills even if I had a workable schematic.
What works the best for an LED that’s supposed to light an area is, for lack of a better term, a bulging mirror that sits on top of them, like you see in a larger scale in bollard light fixtures. All the nightlights I’ve seen instead rely on the plastic diffuser which isn’t nearly as effective. Some of the Philips landscape light replacement have this, but they’re a bit too bright for nightlights and again the problem is getting 12 volts to drive them in an extremely compact package.
A nightlight with proper optics and a decent output might be a decent product idea, except for people expecting to buy a two pack for a couple of dollars at Walmart.