Has anyone used LED strip lighting for their shaping bay ?
I remember seeing posts by a couple of guys about LED in a shaping bay. My experience with LED is that it is quite a bit brighter. Maybe a feasible idea for a new bay, but put a dimmer on it. The flex tube LED isn’t that bright. I got 12’ of light for free for an extra shaping bay, but they are the smaller tubes. I’ll take a look but I think they are T-8. I’ve used T-12 for years. So even that change in a fluorescent will take some getting used to.
Yeah , I remember that post . My main reason is so I can just use existing power points without having to hardwire . …and they sound easier to install . The dimmer sound the go. thx
Yes, I have done a lot of swapping LED bulbs and fixtures to replace fluorescent and Incandescent in private homes. Almost every time the customer complains about the brightness, so we install a dimmer. Works every time. You should be able to use whatever hardwiring you already have with maybe a little adjustment. Be careful down there. I think you are using 240. Don’t get a jolt. Lowel
…another thing I’ve heard , is that they need to be changed more often than fluero s …not sure if that’s the lights or the adaptor unit …would that be right ?
Based on personal experience only I would say probably Not. I use 8’ fluorescent. But I have noticed that 4’ fluorescents act up and turn dark at the ends, flutter etc pretty often. My 8’ers seem to last longer. People link 4’ fluorescent together with the idea that a 4 is cheaper to replace than an 8. But my personal opinion is that 4’ fluorescent screw up more often. One of the major selling points of LED promoted by people like GE and othe manufacturers is that they last longer. And honestly, I believe they do.
While I have not used ribbon leds, or those that are designed to replace fluoresent tubes in a shaping bay, i have lots of experience with LEDs.
I find the individual equally spaced ledss on ribon lights greatly aid the foiling of fins, more so than a solid white bar does. as one can see each led die’s light bend around the fin.
I use 12v DC leds, and use 5 amp voltage buckers to control their brightness. I’ve had bad luck with PWM based LED dimmers making the LEDs whine or flicker at reduced brightness, but the 150khz voltage buckers are efficient and dim them way down to tiny pinpricks of light at sub 5v with no whining…
120 or 220Vac converters that output 12.0v dc are cheap and easy to obtain, but I’d seek ones that go as high as 14.5v dc as substantial brightness can be had with those 2.5 extra volts. The LED’s will get a lot hotter up there, and Heat does kill leds, so adhering them to some sort of heatsink strip or a fan might be required to overclock them at 14+ volts.
I do not know how many rows of LED strip light would equal an 8’ florescent tube, but I think if confined to the 10Mm with with a shroud, they could lay more precise shadows across a shaped blank than the more diffuse light of florescents.
I’ve got a lot of warm white ribbon lighting at the moment with what I think are 5050 chipsets. Not sure, as they were given to me. I am sure they are not the brightest possible options which I would believe house 3030 or 3228 chips.
https://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Kitchen-Christmas-Included-Daylight/dp/B00MHLIFO8?ref_=fsclp_pl_dp_4
I measured 0.9 amps consumption at 12.28v for a sinlgle 8 foot strip with the warm white 5050’s which is 11.05 watts. I have not set them up 8 foot long to compare to my dual 8 foot florescent, but I will and give an estimate of how much light they produce in comparison. My FL light is ceiling mounted over a workbench, so photos even with the same shutter speed and aperture will not represent the light output as shaper lights on a white blank would.
I’ll update with subjective impressions of light output comparisons, once I perform the experiment.
Haven’t used them in a shaping bay, but have used them for workshop lights. These things linked below from our local dollar store equivalent: bright white, certainly. Inexpensive, easy to mount, don’t turn into lots of glass shards if you bang into them, use less power than flourescents, the light not affected by temperature. 0 degrees to at least 90 degrees F, no problem.
Hardwired LED fixtures and switches are … interesting. Especially dimmer switches. Installed a LED fixture to replace a standard single bulb fixture and for some reason it kept killing inexpensive plain light switches. Wound up going with ‘heavy duty’ switches which are still working, but weird that I had to do that for something with just a 20 watt draw .
You want to get both a dimmer switch that is set up for LEDs and LEDs that can be dimmed, it will be on the spec sheets. I noticed that some of the fixtures I looked at were able to work across a wide voltage range so a standard rheostat-type dimmer switch won’t work. What they generally do is change voltage through a variable resistor (which pretty much exhausts my theoretical knowledge of electronics), so it’s a no go.
https://www.oceanstatejoblot.com/4-led-shop-light-40-watt/product/187759 is what I’ve got. I’m sure you can find something similar locally. They just plug in to a standard outlet, pull cord switch, you can daisy chain several together.
If you’re going with something fancier hardwired in, I would swing by the local electrician’s supply store and ask what will work together. Save you a lot of the frustration and aggravation I dealt with.
hope that’s of use
doc…
LED chips work on direct current, Dc electricity. When used in AC alternating current household fixtures there is a converter inside which changes 120 or 240vAC to usually 12 or 24v dc to actually illuminate the LED. This converter is often the failure point, at least in the past. The conversion of AC to DC,can range from 80% to 94% efficient and is another point of failure when the bean counters inevitably have their way in their universal quest for maximum profit, maximum soon.
The reason rheostat dimmers do not work on most LEDs properly, as lowering the input AC voltage does not equally lower the DC output voltage across the AC/DC voltage converter. It just makes the converter work harder outside its intended range until something gives out.
I use 12v DC battery power charged by solar panels to power as many things as I can, within reason. With LEDs designed to use 12v DC, it does not get much easier or reliable to bypass the whole AC component, if starting anew and shuold a brown out/black out occur I can at least see and have ventilation.
The ribbon/ strip lighting I posted comes with a 120/240 to 12vDc converter wall wart. I cut the wires and use 12v power directly from a 12v deep marine battery directly, but can use the battery charger to keep the battery full if the solar can’t, or recharge it at night when juice costs less. Keeping the 8’ fluoros off reduces the chances of tripping a breaker running my table saw and vaccuum dust collector, loading it hard which inevitably screws up the cut to some degree.
A PWM router speed controller might work to dim household LED’s designed to run on a 120vAC to 12vdc converter, and have multiple other uses as well as the intended.
I’m gonna go loosely attach 8’ of led strip light to the white base of the 8 foot fluoro fixture and see how much light 12 watts of warm white LEDs make in comparison. I hate the buzz and flicker of the Fluoro light and only rarely turn it on, except when absolutely required, If I can get similar lighting from the led strip lights gifted me, I will do so.
These LEDs have 3M adhesive backing and can stick right to the fluoro fixtures, or tube bulbs , which would be a pretty good heatsink too.
Ok I just did some testing.
My dual tube 8’ fluoro light, which is pre mid 90’s vintage, perhaps much earlier, sits about 4.5 feet above my 8 foot worktable.
It draws 0.86 amps at 120.4vAC, which is 103.54 watts of consumption. I do not have a lumen/candela app on my phone, but this test might inspire that aquisition.
The fluoro bulbs are dusty, I assume they are rated at 50watts each.
I then hung 8 feet of the warm white ribbon light just below the fluoro light’s center, which has equally spaced led chips about 1 per inch. All leds mostly facing straight down but there was a slight twist and the bow in the middle from hanging.
I was pleasantly surprised with the amount, and the color of the light. It definitely is trying to mimick halogen color, and does not seem as fake as other warm white leds I have used in the past
It drew 0.94 amps @12.7v dc, which is 11.93 watts.
To give some reference for electrical consumption, a 100 watt load for 10 hours is one Kilowatt hour, KWH, which costs something like 20 cents to buy from ther power company, depending on the locale and perhaps time of day. 100 watts of Shaping lights on each wall for 5 hours, costs 2 dollars at that rate.
The largest Lead acid truck battery typically seen is is a group 31 battery, measuring about 13 inches long, 6.5 wide and 9.5 tall to the top of the terminals. It contains roughtly 100 amp hours of capacity, which is roughly 1.2KWH of electrical storage capacity, if the battery were fully charged , and still healthy and could deliver that full capacity without being damaged. In general one should not drain a lead acid battery more than 50% and should recharge it as soon as possible, and 105% to 125% of the energy taken out needs to be returned to it in order for it to reach full charge.
A hundred amp hour healthy fully charged battery can support a 5 amp load for 20 hours before it is 100% depleted. a 5 amp load at 12.0 volts is 60 watts. The 24 feet of warm white leds consumed 32.13 watts at 12.5v. Therefore fully charged group 31 battery can power this amount of these specific leds, for close to 40 hours straight, before it is fully depleted.
One single Hundred watt solar panel aimed at the sun can produce about 5.5 to 5.8 battery charging amps, for about 2 hours before and after solar noon, and if reaimed at the sun 3 times a day or more, can harvest maybe 65 to 75 amp hours total in summer and considerably less in the lower sun angles and shorter days of winter.
There are a whole bunch of ifs and and confusing butts and variables to these numbers, but in general they give an accurate point of reference, as I know electricity is a bit of a mystery to most, and taken for granted.
It is very hard to accurately judge how much light is given off, especially when the color temperature is different, the warm white likely low to mid 4K and the fluoro likely mid 6k or higher. The whiter 6.5k light will always seem to be brighter, even when it is not, and blueish light is harder on ones eyes, especially as one ages.
I am sure you guys notice even the factory LED lights on vehicles in the opposing lane at night yield much more painful and blinding glare, than the yellowish halogens. Some amber tinted glasses help a lot in my experience. Their total lumen output halogen vs LED is very similar, by law, yet 99 people out a hundred will always think the led light projected ahead of their eyes, helps them see better, when physics says it does not. Hard to not believe one’s eyes, so this will never change.
I estimate that a single 8’ strip of the warm white leds lit my worktable about 35% as brightly as when I switched on the fluoro . I have another 16 feet of the same and strung that up as well for a total of 24 feet tripled up across the 8 foot span, not using the adhesive backing.
I estimate that there is 85% of the warm white LED light, a reaching my worktable’ center, compared to the Fluoro. The 24 feet of leds drew 2.57 amps at 12.5v, which is 32.13 watts. With the leds hanging about 6 inches in the middle, on either end the leds were aimed more towards the walls. I would estimate that the walls were just as bright as the fluoro light, if not more so.
I suspect that if the 24 feet of leds were all mounted flat, aimed flat at the table they would be 90 to 95% as bright as the dual tube 8’ fluoro on the work surface I bet if the light were confined on the sides with a reflective material shroud, I could get more light on the table than the Fluoro’s for roughly 1/3 the electrical consumption.
I forgot to bring voltage upto the mid 14v range, but in my experience with other leds that do not have constant current limiting circuitry, the extra 2 volts raises lumen output and amp draw more than 20%, and running them at 80% brightness uses 50% the wattage as 100% brightness.
I much preferred the warm led light to the Fluoro, so thanks for starting this thread as it got me to finally test the gifted ribbon lighting, and since I hated to use the fluoro light, now I never have to again, and can save ~ 70 watts each time, which certainly adds up over a month long period.
The cool white or xenon white leds produce more lumens per watt compared to warm white. I expect if one ran four rows of 8 foot strips of these cool white ribbon leds next to each other, they will equal and perhaps exceed the output of dual 8’ fluoros, for approximately half the electrical draw, and be easily dimmable if they are too bright.
I did hold up a finished fin and could watch individual leds wrap around the foil, getting closer together in the cutout and wider across the tip as I manipulated the angle. I am not sure how this will translate to shaping blanks.
While there was never any option but to mount fluorolights level with ones racks, one could slightly bend these led ribbon lights to mimick the rocker of the board and have the approximately the same amount of light exit from a 40 mm wide ~1.5" aperture, insteads of the ~ 6 inch wide aperture of a dual fluoro housing. . Again I don’t know how this will translate to actual shaping, sharper more precise shadows? but it certainly will be different, which is all too often unacceptable as good enough then is often more than good enough now.
I can’t be sure, but these appear to be the led strip lights I just tested, or at least very similar:
It comes with the 120vAC to 12vDC transformer, and the dimmer. I am sure better prices can be found, and they have the cool white version too, which some will no doubt prefer, and should actually be brighter too, instead of just whiter, which is always perceived as brighter anyway.
The warm white will not appear to be as bright as the cool white due to the way the human eye and bra together perceive brightness, and likely will not be as bright if measured with an actual light meter.
I’ll look into lumen/candela apps for my phone and try to acquire actual data, and see how it compares to my subjective opinion/ estimation of light output.
If one wanted to run many 33 foot strips of leds( they can be cut down in 4 inch increments) then having separate 120vAC to 12vDC converters will waste available plug space and be less efficient than a single larger voltage converter/power supply. This is an inexpensive adjustable voltage power supply that can power 360 watts of LEDs upto near 15 volts, which would be a ridiculous amount of light and run the leds hotter than designed, all the way down to 10.5v ish volts which will be dimmer than 12.0v. A fully charged battery is generally 12.6 to 12.8v. One need not stress the tenths of a volt on such devices. but say that 12.0v is just a bit too dim, they can perhaps gain 10 % more at 13v and 20% more light at 14v, and if they do not get too hot, perhaps 30% more at 15v. Light output and amp draw is not linear above or below the 12v rating.
The dimmers provided with each ~ 35 watt 33 foot strip linked above, can still be used to dim individual strips, just cut off the plug on the voltage end of the transformer end of the dimmer, and strip the red and black wires within, red is (+) and black is (-). Sometimes white will be +.
One will have to proivide their own AC wiring to feed this power supply. The Black wire is (L) the white wire is (N) the green wire is ground Adjusting voltage requires a small jewelers screwdriver, and the little adjustment potentiometer is rated for 50 cycles only.
I’ve modified these into 30 amp battery chargers with adjustable voltage, but there are some dangers involved and I have moved to a more professional power supply maker.
My battery charger is a Meanwell rsp-500-15 model, capable of 40 amps at any voltage from 13.12 to 19.23 volts though in general one never wants to push a 77f 12v lead acid battery above 15 volts when charging, or below 11v when discharging.
A big thanks for all for these replies - some invaluable knowledge . I’m now pretty much convinced LED is the way to go . I need to see my lighting supplier next and get some prices …I’ll post up some progress pics when the installation begins…thanks again
Yes. 110 VAC LED strips mounted to various protable and fixed stands. About 75% as bright as fluoro tubes tested via a solar cell and multimeter, works for me as I am a hobbyist and my work spaces are small. This pic shows 13’ strips adapted for a 10’ room, the one on the left was hinged to allow me to climb into the bay.
looks neat …do you have ceiling lights ?
Thanks. Yes, there is an overhead light with two 13w LED bulbs, and a window to the outside on one wall. When I am shaping in there the window is blocked off with a black poly tarp.
Right now the room is in guest room mode so the left hand side light is stowed in the garage and there is a twin bed in the corner where the totes are in the other picture. Regardless of mode, there are a couple boards in the room on a wall rack.
Probably the neatest set of lights are from tjrm63, the multi-colored ones.
I made an 8’ long C shaped Dougfir shroud, with a ~11mm deep, 32mm wide channel, for the warm white strips lights, and painted the interior silver with high temperature paint.
The 32mm width, allows for 4 rows of the 8mm wide strip lights facing straight down and one on each side of the C. I have so far added two strips of leds to the outer part of the C, facing straight down, and feed them on a 5 amp DC voltage bucker/dimmer/converter to which I have added a finger twist potentiometer.
I got a free Lightmeter app for my phone. I put the phone in the middle of my 8’ work table directly under the lights, elevated 8 inches above it, and 30 inches below both the dual 8’ tube fluoro lights, and the New 8 foot shroud I just made. The Fluoro light with dust wiped off the bulbs, Spikes to 605 Lux for a millisecond on start up and then averages 537LUX, but this number jumps quickly up and down ~80 Lux around this average. This is for 103 watts of electrical consumption. The fluoro flicker is readily apparent with the LUX Number jumping steadily up and down.
I turned on the LEDs and turned off the Fluoros.
At 12.9v rock steady 526 LUX for for 1.84 amps or 23 watts.
At 13.6v rock steady 585 LUX for 2.08 amps, or 28.28 watts.
At 14.7v rock steady 673 LUX for 2.57 amps, or 37.78 watts.
This includes the inefficiency of the 5 amp XL4005 voltage buck converter I am using as a dimmer, which drops no less than 0.27v across it and is at best 94% efficient< meaning if no dimming was desired, one could get higher voltage to the LEDS and more light from them, by not using a Dimming buck converter.
Many Purpose build PWM LED dimmers will drop about 0.09v across them, and unless they are 21KHZ or higher, can make the leds whine, possibly flicker. I am using a 12v group 27 AGM battery as the power source, but can change its voltage easily with an adjustable voltage power supply, I could skip the battery, but have a 100 watt solar panel facing south and consider it nearly free energy.
The DC voltages above are not exactly battery voltage, or the voltage reaching the voltage converter. There is some voltage drop on the testing leads, I did not probe the actual contacts at the XL4005 voltage converter to see how much voltage was actually reaching it, but it drops 0.27 volts across it. Voltage buckers based on the XL4015 transistor drop 0.18v across them in my experience at about 40 watts of load.
The higher the voltage the brighter the light, but they get exponentially hotter too, and 14.7v is not something I’d want to maintain for a long time in hot ambient temps, though I did not actually bust out the IR temp gun to see how hot they got compared to lesser voltage. 14.7v is generally the maximum charging voltage one feeds a 12v battery. Generally fully charged, rested they are 12.8v, 50% is about 12.2v rested and 100% discharged is 10.5v, though some batteries will say 11.0 volts.
So IN my case I can get nearly equal lux on my tabletop for about 1/4 the wattage, and No flicker, and I can dim them down to tiny pinpricks of light so dim I can’t measure the LUX or the amperage/wattage consumed.
I could add 4 more warm white strips, 32 more feet to add to the 16 existing, to this particular shroud, but will likely not, as it almost equals the fluoro at 12.8v and more light than this is rarely required.
I have an RGB IP68 LED strip I can put in the middle, controlled separately, for multicolor possibilities. It does have a cool white mode with another 9 dimness settings with the brightest adding about 124Lux and about 15 watts.
I’m relocating the dual 8’ fluoro away from above, up out of the way, and can now fit another board or 2 up there, and not have to worry about the tube’s fragility.
I am excited by actual Data with the light meter App.
My subjective impressions of light output, fluoro vs LED were way off, but the LEDs in the initial test, were not contained in a reflective C channel either, they were just hanging from the ends of the fluoro tubes.
The Cool white LEDS strips should be even brighter and are likely more efficient, but I am digging the Warm white color of these on my table, and the dimming function too.
Very happy with my new lights. No idea how they would compare in efficacy, as actual shaping lights, I don’t have an actual shaping room at the moment, but I think a generally equal amount of light exiting a narrower aperture would yield more precise shadows, like a small camera aperture focusing things both far and near, far better than a large aperture. I’ve achieved nearly the same output from a 8’ long C channel, not even an inch and a half wide as I get on my table from a dual tube 8’ fluoro, for less than 1/3 the electrical consumption.
This 8’ C channel LED light wand is very light, can easily hold it by the end, and move it around. Hopefully the Peel and stick 3M adhesive endures potential flexing and heat cycling.