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Combine this with the engine ignition, fuel pump, heater blower motor, and the other electronics in your 4x4 and you could be challenging your charging system. However, when you mount four 100-watt lights to your 4x4, they have the potential to consume more than 33 amps. By itself, one light is not all that big of a deal. A typical 12V 100-watt halogen light will draw slightly more than 8 amps. As expected, the higher-wattage lights draw more current too. The higher the wattage is, the brighter the light will be. Halogen lights are available in many different wattages the most common being 55 and 100 watt. So you can forget about duct taping grandma’s vintage desk lamp to your front bumper. However, the design and function of a halogen bulb makes it more vibration resistant and allows it to last longer and shine brighter than an incandescent bulb. Halogen lights function similar to a traditional incandescent light bulb, where electricity is used to heat a tungsten filament and create light. They were the only game in town for several decades because the other off-road lighting technologies had not yet progressed and become affordable. The Metal Halide Solarc Lamp outputs up to 60 lumens of light per watt.įurther, bike LEDs have a basically unlimited life span, while HID are limited to ~1000ish on/off cycles.Halogen lights are the oldest and least efficient of the three prevalent off-road light designs. A decent halogen lamp can also output approx. The rule of thumb in bikes is a well aligned LED lighting system outputs up to 90 lumens per watt. Also, it's possible HID's don't scale down as well, while LED's don't scale up as well due to this cooling issue. In a bike light, with a tiny size, you can make the whole housing an aluminum heatsink, and it has a lot of surface area for the emitter size, and it's all exposed to open air. The big limitation with LEDs is all their heat, even though there is less of it than in an HID, is concentrated in a VERY tiny area, and is not emitted out the front of the reflector as on a halogen or HID light, and heat reduces their efficiency and lifespan. Pretty much every bike light maker is abandoning HID in favor of LED, and are getting equal runtimes out of smaller, lighter, less expensive batteries (which is a big issue with bikes), which means they're running more efficiently. I'm not familiar with the issues on cars, but am familiar with bike lights. HIDs are still king for the foreseeable future as the brightest, most efficient light source for MAIN beams. So most of the time you see banks of lower powered LEDs which are easier to dissipate the heat because they physically take up more space. LEDs also have a very fast turn on/off, and don't take a "hit" in life span for activating them, so in tail lights/street lights that are Colored, they definetly are the future.Īs for headlights, we'll see how they improve the silicon technology, the biggest problem for LEDs is heat dissipation because they produce so MUCH heat, you have to always have heatsinks on LEDS of that power, or you will burn up the LED. So called "white" LEDs are merely blue LEDs with a phosphor coating that glows red/yellow to simulate other colors so they take a huge hit in that they're not natively producing all frequencies. So LEDs are more "efficient" in that they are single wavelength devices. In the past they used halogen bulbs which put out light over every wavelength, and then you filter (block) out what you don't want, so you end up wasting like 95% of your energy in light that is blocked. when only one color is desired, they excel because they put 100% of their energy into one wavelength. The misconception comes from the efficiency gained in producing colored light. Will they increase in efficiency in the future? probably some, but the physics of "semiconductor" (LEDs) just isn't there to produce more efficient "white" light. The only light source they are MORE efficient than, is Halogen/incandescent at 20-30 lumens/watt. There's a common misconception about LEDs being more efficient in fact they are about 50 lumens/watt, which is below fluorescents at about 80 lumens/watt, and HIDs going from 100-200 lumens/watt.
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I'll forward this post by saying that I used to be a moderator on hidplanet, so I know my lighting.