spinnanz

I wanted to retrofit leds into my original 6v lights. £1 got me 5x bulbs from aliexpress.

The lights run off the USB port of the battery in the pannier bag (the bike is electric).

Bulbs should never need changing again.

gilesa

How bright are they, as compared to the original bulbs?

zacster

An LED bulb should be much brighter than the old one, and draw less power too.

gilesa

Should be so, if good quality. But these were very cheap.

spinnanz

They are a LOT brighter. I'll take a picture tonight of the LED bulb vs a 3w standard bulb both running on 6v.

spinnanz

Here we are, 3w incandecent bulbs vs 0.3w LED. The led is easily brighter.

gilesa

Thanks!

Iride01 

A friend of mine bought a bunch of LED lights and fixtures to replace the cabin lights in his boat. By the second year on the high seas, he'd replaced them with conventional lightbulbs and fixtures. LED itself isn't any longer lasting than filament or fluorescent lamps. It's the design standards they are built to. Some don't build them as well.

unterhausen

LED emitters are significantly longer lasting than incandescent bulbs given that their current limit is respected, but the supporting electronics is more complicated and is more likely to fail than the emitter. Although in a replacement bulb like the OP has, it may not make much difference. Do the lights on a boat run off of DC?

steelbikeguy

I would say that the supporting electronics could last a lot longer too, if the light was designed to keep the electronics a bit cooler. To some degree, the use of the cheapest and lousiest electronic components also contributes to the early death of some LED bulbs.

I've got some little bulbs from Feit (I think..) in my bathroom. I had a couple fail early (within a year or so), so I added small heatsinks to reduce the temperature of the electronics and LEDs. Since then, they have been running for two or three years without any failures.

I've also made my own LED lights. One is a desk lamp, where the LEDs are provided enough heatsinking to keep them around 50 deg C. I've been using it at least 4 to 6 hours a day since 2011 with no failures. It has been powered from a power brick scavenged from an Epson scanner that died. This power brick must have been running 10 or 15 years, which says a lot about the good engineering. This does show that LED lights can be very reliable. The downside is that this level of reliability will be quite a bit more expensive than the cheap lights on the market.

Steve in Peoria

Iride01 

Yes.

12 volt DC.

At least that is typical for boats of this size and type.

spinnanz

Yeahs ago I toon had problems with led conversions fitted to cars. After a few months they would flicker, or not work. I was lead to belive this was due to bad heat dissipation.

Given these are low wattage (less than 0.5w), I'm fairly confident that heat won't kill them. I could have gone for high wattage led but really all I wanted was something that kept in line with the look of the bike.