anyone heard of these little beuties?
i found a system today which i will be installing into my house in the next couple of days...
the system consists of a solar panel or transfomer/charger or both if you want...4 lights contructed out of stainless steel...including 2 x 5 metre and 2 x 10 metre cables...a day/night switch...a control panel which holds the battery and invertor for the solar panel...and you have a choice of either a solar panel which makes it completly independant from the electricity mains...but heres the bonus the lights stay on for 10 hours on a 7 amp/hr battery (same size as your alarm or gate motor battery)...this sytem is brilliant..the entire sytem uses 6 watts of power and costs less than R2000and it is fully DIY.
for camping this sytem is probably the best thing i have ever seen...you could connect to a big battery and have lights for more than a week without switching them off.
you can also get individual lights...which plug into a cigarette lighter or it comes with croc clips to go onto a battery...for around R150...also made of stainless steel...you can use it as a lead light...i have a 12 volt power pack which i have it plugged into at the moment...to test it to see how bright the lights are.
what i like about it is i dont want a solar panel now...so i can use a small transfomer/charger to charge the battery for now and when the load shedding starts next year i can get a solar panel and install it...
i will postion the 4 lights in such a way that there will be no need to switch on and off lights to see where i am going at night...and if the power goes off the lights will continue to work for an additional 10 hours....once i fit the solar panel i will just leave the lights to switch on and off with the day/night switch.
the lights are resin filled so they have something like an IP65 rating...when we were doing tests we dipped them in a bucket of water to see what would happen...and it still worked while in the water...considering the lights are only 12volts and fed from the batery there is no danger.
once i receive my pack i will post pics of the system.
this system was designed for areas which dont have electricity...but i believe there is a market for it everywhere...i think these people are sitting on a gold mine and they dont even know it...they are building them in a garge at home.
it could even be used as emergency lighting in offices...parking areas...stairways...the lights are bright enough for these type of applications...as a backup...for power failures.
i havent got the details but i think the lights use about 120 mA of power each
i did some tests with a lux metre and at 1 metre the light is 20 lux...@ 500 mm 100 lux...and goes up to almost 1000 lux when the meter was close.
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