"Roadkill" LED lighting
This is probably going to be a bit of a niche post, but it was too amusing not to share with all of you. Lets start at the beginning:
The northern realms around where I live currently have, among other things, a lot of ice and a lot of seriously overbuilt trucks. It's just a climactic thing. Unfortunately, those individuals with overbuilt trucks are not always the most careful when driving on ice and often end up smashing said trucks right into things. So, there was a pretty big wreck of this nature a few weeks ago, and my spouse's boss was digging around in one of the wrecks after the truck had been towed off the collision scene (not sure exactly why - but my understanding is that he's a weird and insightful dude... but I and cannot judge as I too am weird, if not insightful)
He found, flung off the truck during the crash, a 41" curved LED light-bar, with 80 LED chips which appear to be ~5W each. He thought this was neat, and due to the severe gardening habit myself and the spouse share, he thought of us and took this thing to work where he gifted it to my husband. This was Feb 12th, incidentally. It's super fun when my 'normal plant' gardening habit works in my favor and people bring me things like this.
The husband forgot to bring it home for a few days, so this Valentines day I was gifted with this gigantic LED light bar, complete with full aluminum heat-sink fins... I was actually oddly excited about this. Way more fun that roses, anyhow.
So we managed to do some research and I am pretty sure I found the exact model of light-bar on an aftermarket website. This thing was PRICEY new! ~$770 for a 400W LED...
But if you find it free by the side of the road, suddenly one $40 power supply later, you're in business!
Because these lights are designed to run of vehicle electrical, they're designed for constant-voltage driving, and have current limiting resistors built in. This means that even a reasonable computer power supply can often run them off the 12V rail. In our case, we got a stand-alone power supply rated around 12V/40A and it's working really well so far.
The downside is at 41", it's too big to fit in either of my tents. I may give this one up for growing normal plants. The spouse has a thing for succulents, so I'm thinking we need to make him a "Zen garden / Cactus field" planter box at some point, and given how bright this is, it would probably make some desert plants quite happy.
It's reading at ~58,000 lumens around the 12" mark. Main disadvantage is that the lenses on this one seem to make it very directional - the beam remains fairly tight, so it covers a fairly small area intensely.
There is also one last thing we need to do before putting this thing into service: We need to do a bit of a stress test. It's working fine now, but I'd rather set it up on a GFCI-protected circuit and run it for a few days to ensure there is no damage from the crash and to keep track of the temperature - need to make sure those fins can passively cool the lights even when they're not moving down a highway! (It should be okay if there isn't damage - people do use these for lighting worksites, etc, with the truck stationary - but better safe than sorry!).
I can't imagine that a lot of people have their spouse's boss gift them ~$750 LED bars, but if you're wandering around a scrap yard and looking for a new lighting project, maybe one of these will be hanging off the side of a highly customized and then crashed truck? Who knows!
The northern realms around where I live currently have, among other things, a lot of ice and a lot of seriously overbuilt trucks. It's just a climactic thing. Unfortunately, those individuals with overbuilt trucks are not always the most careful when driving on ice and often end up smashing said trucks right into things. So, there was a pretty big wreck of this nature a few weeks ago, and my spouse's boss was digging around in one of the wrecks after the truck had been towed off the collision scene (not sure exactly why - but my understanding is that he's a weird and insightful dude... but I and cannot judge as I too am weird, if not insightful)
He found, flung off the truck during the crash, a 41" curved LED light-bar, with 80 LED chips which appear to be ~5W each. He thought this was neat, and due to the severe gardening habit myself and the spouse share, he thought of us and took this thing to work where he gifted it to my husband. This was Feb 12th, incidentally. It's super fun when my 'normal plant' gardening habit works in my favor and people bring me things like this.
The husband forgot to bring it home for a few days, so this Valentines day I was gifted with this gigantic LED light bar, complete with full aluminum heat-sink fins... I was actually oddly excited about this. Way more fun that roses, anyhow.
So we managed to do some research and I am pretty sure I found the exact model of light-bar on an aftermarket website. This thing was PRICEY new! ~$770 for a 400W LED...
But if you find it free by the side of the road, suddenly one $40 power supply later, you're in business!
Because these lights are designed to run of vehicle electrical, they're designed for constant-voltage driving, and have current limiting resistors built in. This means that even a reasonable computer power supply can often run them off the 12V rail. In our case, we got a stand-alone power supply rated around 12V/40A and it's working really well so far.
The downside is at 41", it's too big to fit in either of my tents. I may give this one up for growing normal plants. The spouse has a thing for succulents, so I'm thinking we need to make him a "Zen garden / Cactus field" planter box at some point, and given how bright this is, it would probably make some desert plants quite happy.
It's reading at ~58,000 lumens around the 12" mark. Main disadvantage is that the lenses on this one seem to make it very directional - the beam remains fairly tight, so it covers a fairly small area intensely.
There is also one last thing we need to do before putting this thing into service: We need to do a bit of a stress test. It's working fine now, but I'd rather set it up on a GFCI-protected circuit and run it for a few days to ensure there is no damage from the crash and to keep track of the temperature - need to make sure those fins can passively cool the lights even when they're not moving down a highway! (It should be okay if there isn't damage - people do use these for lighting worksites, etc, with the truck stationary - but better safe than sorry!).
I can't imagine that a lot of people have their spouse's boss gift them ~$750 LED bars, but if you're wandering around a scrap yard and looking for a new lighting project, maybe one of these will be hanging off the side of a highly customized and then crashed truck? Who knows!
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