# Led Lights



## TwoElkhounds (Mar 11, 2007)

So, spent a couple hundred bucks on LED light hoping to reduce my power consumption while dry camping. The new LED lights have been turning off every now and again, so I pull the cover to investigate and find the darn things to be pretty blazing hot. Get one out of the fixture and here is what I find.










Notice the casing has begun to melt from the heat. While I have not measured the current draw of these lights, I do know they get hot enough to burn your finger tips. Not what I expected from an LED light, heat means wasted power.

I bought another brand LED and they are not nearly as hot as these. I still have all the packaging for these melting LED's and I think I am going to take them back and ask for my money back.

Curious on what experiences others have had with their LEDs?

DAN


----------



## CamperAndy (Aug 26, 2004)

They can be warm to the touch but should never run hot enough to melt the housing like that. Does that location line up with the LED or with a voltage drop resistor?


----------



## sdizzyday (Feb 13, 2008)

I have installed these in almost all of my fixtures. They work great and are not hot at all. The 'warm white' gives a beautiful look in the OB.
http://cgi.ebay.com/High-Power-36-1210-SMD-LED-Festoon-Dome-Bulb-Warm-White-/170548003095?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27b5740117


----------



## TwoElkhounds (Mar 11, 2007)

CamperAndy said:


> They can be warm to the touch but should never run hot enough to melt the housing like that. Does that location line up with the LED or with a voltage drop resistor?


Casing is sealed so it cannot be easily opened, but there is a small black device/part directly under the melted portion of the plastic housing. The part gets very hot, hence the melting plastic. This is the hot spot on the LED, but the whole housing gets very hot. I am not an LED light expert, but I was not expecting these things to get so hot. They seem no better than the light bulb I replaced. Once I get some time, I will need to look at the current draw on these things.

DAN


----------



## john7349 (Jan 13, 2008)

sdizzyday said:


> I have installed these in almost all of my fixtures. They work great and are not hot at all. The 'warm white' gives a beautiful look in the OB.
> http://cgi.ebay.com/...=item27b5740117


I bought these also. Just warm to the touch and a GREAT price. Shipping from China is slow, but worth the 2 week wait. I don't see why others cost so much.


----------



## willingtonpaul (Apr 16, 2010)

i also bought the starlight LED's. another camping buddy of mine saw them first, and we both put some in. out of the 12 i bought (i bought the 160 lumin natural light wedge type base bulbs) i had two do what yours are doing (starting to blink when they get very hot). the others are fine. i think there must have been a bad batch; i plan to bring them back to swap out for new ones. the others just get a little warm, not anything like these that are having trouble. i did not let them run enough to start to melt on the backside; they starting blinking after about maybe 5 mins on and upon taking the cover off i could tell they were really hot and figured that was the issue so i shut them down.

i love the light spectrum on these, vs. the more bluish LED's that i have seen. these starlight bulbs do draw a bit more than the more traditional LED's. on my trimetric, i have noticed that the 160 lumin bulb draws around .30 AH, vs. more like .20 for a traditional LED. the stock incandecents are around 1.5 AH.

take the bulbs back and swap them for other starlights. i have 10 that are working just fine. they are a brand new technology, only just really coming out in march of this year, roughly....


----------



## TwoElkhounds (Mar 11, 2007)

I took out the rest of my LED's the other day (7 total) and 5 out of the 7 were melted pretty badly. Two of the casings had begun to deform and were melting on the front of the LED, as well as the back. Notice the discoloration and the rounded edges in the picture below, that is melting plastic.










I brought them back to the store and asked for a refund. They complained and tried to blame it on improper installation.







They said they had never seen this before, but they eventually refunded my $250. Now to find another brand.

DAN


----------



## dirtengineer (Jun 6, 2010)

I am on my second season with a couple of these.

I also modified the lights (added a DPDT switch in place of the factory switch) so that I can turn one side of the double lights on by itself or both. I find that in most cases one of the LED lights is adequate.


----------



## thefulminator (Aug 8, 2007)

Check your voltage on your 12 volt system. I had a tent trailer a few years back that lost the voltage regulator. Went camping and noticed that it seemed pretty bright in the trailer. Then found out that all the lenses on my interior lights were melting. Was running around 16 volts. They were standard bulbs but you could be experiencing the same thing. Would hate to see you burn out another set and have to pay to replace them.


----------



## Gilligan (Aug 25, 2006)

All of those drop-in replacement LED lights are rated for 12V. The 3-stage converters in our trailers can go as high as 14.4V when they are in the "bulk charge" mode. That is a 20% voltage increase over 12V, which translates to a 44% increase in power, assuming a constant load resistance. But LED's are diodes, and do not present a constant resistance to varying voltage. As voltage increases, the resistance goes down, and currently increases in a non-linear fashion, causing an even greater increase in power than what the increase in voltage would cause on a constant load. A properly designed LED lighting circuit should have some form of active current limit, instead of the simple resistor found in most of the replacement LED lights. Old fashioned incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, are not quite so sensitive to over-voltage as they have a positive temperature coefficient of resistance. The hotter they get, the higher the resistance, which helps limit current.

Gilligan


----------

