# Retrofitting a camper with LED lighting (Added Photo)



## wjv (Sep 22, 2014)

Just retrofitted my 7 year old camper with LED lighting.

The original lighting used seventeen 921 incandescent bulbs. Each bulb sucked 1.7 amps!!

Since we run off of our batteries quite a bit we rarely used the interior lighting. I was on RV.net and read that several people had good luck with some LED replacement "bulbs" from a seller on eBay. They are direct plug in replacements for the 921 bulbs.

Google: ebay "30pcs T10 194 921" "White RV"

$33 for 30 replacement units. Well I was a bit skeptical, but for $33 I didn't have a lot to lose. All I can say is they were GREAT. They plugged right in and I retrofitted the entire camper in 20 minutes. The light is a bit cooler than it was with the incandescent bulbs. (No surprise) But they are nice and bright and there is not a hint of purple/green/yellow or such. Jut nice white cool light. Each light in the camper held two bulbs, and I discovered that my trailer was wired so that the polarity of those two bulbs were opposite each other. So that meant that when i installed the lights, one "bulb" faces down while the other one faces up. But there was no noticeable effects on the lighting.

Most interesting is that I have a Yamaha 2000 watt generator that has an economy mode setting on it. When using the old incandescent bulbs I could turn on ONE bulb, and the generator would kick out of econo mode and the RPMs would rev up. Unis the LEDs I turned on ALL seventeen lights, and the generator stayed in econo mode!! I guess that says a lot about the current draw of these LED lights Vs the incandescent bulbs!


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## yuandrew (Sep 27, 2014)

A while back when Bridgelux arrays were the best "bang for the buck", I tried to make something for a friend's popup using two Bridgelux ES arrays driven with 700ma LuxDrive BuckBullet drivers. Mounted them on a thick gauged piece of aluminum for a heatsink and super glued them inside a gutted Thin Lite model 312 fixture. They gave out a rather blinding 450 lumens of 3000k light each.

Currently looking into something I could stick into a BA15 single contact bayonet socket in place of a 1141 incandescent bulb (I believe those use about 18 watts each for 250 lumens) I'm thinking about using a Utilitech landscape lighting retrofit I found at Lowes and a bi-pin to bayonet adapter.


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