By Greg Illes
Back in the late ’90s, small, unknown companies were about to make electronic history. New developments heralded a sea of change in the LED lighting market and the world of lighting overall. In succeeding years, bright LED lights have worked their way into every realm of artificial light, from flashlights to traffic signals and even outdoor video displays.
It is only natural for RV technology to benefit from this new capability, with a huge array of light fixtures and light bulbs available for RV LED lighting. Why all the fuss and excitement? Two really simple reasons:
First, LED lights use very little energy to produce light as compared to other light sources such as incandescent. For a given amount of light, an incandescent bulb might use 1.5A from your battery. For the same light, a fluorescent will draw 0.5A, and an LED will draw only 0.15A (one tenth)!
This can have remarkable impact on battery endurance. In practical terms, lights that would drain your battery in a day or two can be run for a week or more.
The second reason to use LED lighting is that these bulbs will far outlast incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, with lifespans normally 10 times fluorescents and around 50 times incandescents. For most practical purposes, in RV use they are lifetime bulbs which helps to offset their initial cost.
THE CHANGEOVER
Converting to LED can be as simple as changing light bulbs or as complicated as changing or adding entire light fixtures. For this discussion, we’ll focus on the bulb change.
SHAPES
Bulbs come in three general shapes — flood, projector and right angle. They also come with different bases, with the 1141/1157 (bayonet) being one of the more common. You’ll need to purchase whichever format is right for your fixtures.
INTENSITY
Bulbs are available in a fairly wide range of intensity, which is measured in “lumens.” A 10-lumen light is suitable for a dim night-light, while 100-200 lumens will work for room lighting.
COLOR “TEMPERATURE”
Bulbs called “white” can vary from warm (yellowish) light to cool (bluish) light. This characteristic will be typically rated in degrees kelvin, such as 5500. Whichever shade you prefer, keep the color consistent throughout any common area or the light will look strange and distracting.
These bulbs are available everywhere these days (RV retailers, Amazon, auto stores) but at wide price variances, so it pays to shop around. Since the bulbs are expensive, you may want to only partially retrofit the most-used fixtures.
Greg Illes is a retired systems engineer who loves thinking up RV upgrades and modifications. When he’s not working on his motorhome, he’s traveling in it. You can follow his blog at www.divver-city.com/blog.
Still, keep in mind a golf cart battery is a six-volt battery. To replace the typical RV storage battery, you’ll need two of them — twice the footprint — to make one usable battery. The two batteries will need to be hooked up in series, that is, the negative terminal of one of them must be hooked to the positive terminal of its partner. Then the free terminals of the batteries — a positive and a negative — will be hooked to your RV battery leads.
An inverter converts 12-volt RV battery power into “shore power,” that many other shore power-loving devices can work with. We’ll keep this entry simple and expand into more detail in the future. For small power applications, say your blender and battery charger applications for portable power tools, a small, “plug it in the cigarette lighter” inverter is ideal.
If it isn’t tied down it will fall, roll around and make a mess. This twisting and turning, the churning and shaking, all cause wear and tear on things that are secured in drawers like your pots and pans. If you store metal on metal it will cause abrasion and do things like wear off that nice T-fal non-stick coating on your expensive pans.
Some RVers use bubble wrap or dish towels to accomplish this. I wore off the non-stick coating on my last electric skillet by putting the lid upside down in it so the drawer would close. Now I put a rubber muffin pan in the skillet before I put the lid in place and it protects the non-stick lining of the skillet from abrasion.
Always check your blind spots, which are bigger and more prevalent on RVs. Using mirrors increases your safety but they don’t always show everything on the road, so always be aware of what’s around you.
Noise: Many RVers say that a FRED (FRont End Diesel) motorhome is a lot more prone to be noisy while motoring down the road. One even suggested that if you want a FRED, consider installing an intercom system, like you might have in a helicopter.
We had always looked at all the waterways that we passed by and thought somewhat wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be nice to wander over to the far side of that peaceful little lake,” or something to that effect. After a half-day guided kayak tour in a local slough, we began looking into inflatable kayaks. Inflatables have both advantages and disadvantages over the hard-shell, do-or-die kayaks that you see the death-wish guys flinging down waterfalls.
The RVer was left a bit shaken: Do older RVs burn up because of newer electrical services? The answer to that question is, No. Properly wired and maintained RVs, regardless of age, don’t “catch fire” by being plugged into a “modern” electrical service. The smoke here was from the RV park puffing up an improbable excuse to refuse an “older” RV.
We still argue against the smarts of using a “Bearing Buddy” or “Easy Lube” system; we’re still not convinced that the system is all that great, in that, if you pump in a different kind of grease than is already in the system, you may easily have fatal compatibility issues. But even without that point, the picture illustrates the wisdom of periodic inspections of the inside of those hubs.
The suggestion was to spray your plastic headlights with inspect spray containing a high concentrations of Deet. Yeah, a shot of Deet, followed by a wipe down with a rag or paper towel, and Hey, Presto! your headlights are cleared up again. Is it really so?
My living room window was broken when our deck table fell through it during a storm. Do you have to take the whole window out to fix it? It was the bottom window portion that broke. —Gail, Sebring, FL
someone support the window from the outside as you gently push from the inside. At this point, all that is holding the window in place is the sealant around the perimeter of the exterior. Work the wide putty knife around the frame as you carefully push the window out of the opening through the sidewall.