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Do you have a link for where you bought these ?

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You'd think that Amazon would have a huge liability selling stuff like this.

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I am looking at these for over my workbenches:

I am waiting for the sample I bought. It's in the mailbox, but I'd have to shoot my neighbors damned dog to get out of the house right now. It dug under the fence, tore up my trash cans and spread it all over my back yard. I didn't realize it was out there, and nearly got bit.

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I've been running LED lights for our house entryway for about a year now. They seem to be standing up to the extremes of heat and cold just fine.

I'm now looking for reasonably priced LED equivalent to a PAR30 short neck 100W (incandescent) flood.

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I have installed LED strip lighting under the cabinet edges in my wife's office... great illumination.

As for the dog. 50 years ago a neighbor's dog chased my wife. Went next door and simply said, "your dog chases my wife again... I'll kill it".

You should have seen the chain >:-}

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That is one ugly solder job. They didn't bother to clean the flux off. I wonder what the power factor is on these, or if they even cared.

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Actually we even have CFL in the bathrooms where they get turned on and off all the time. The ones from Costco do that nicely. They do start maybe 50% down in light level if it's really cold in the room, like

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I am looking for such lamps as outdoor floods with darkness detector. Occasionally there's a good deal but _all_ only with motion sensors. Useless. Why don't the marketeers get it into their heads that lots of situations require constant light at night and that this just may be the reason people look for LED?

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Just leave the LEDs on all the time. They only use a few watts, and there's less stuff to break.

It's hardly worth using a timer, even. The timer motor will average more energy wasted than it buys back.

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They came with a data sheet! 10.4 VA, 0.51 PF. Lots of light for 5 watts.

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I plan to do some of that for some security camera lighting. That way, I can run 12 volts to the fixtures and not have to use conduit. Running a few LEDs off 12 volts is not too big a design challenge; I may not even use Spice.

Hmmm, I could pull some of those aluminum LED slabs out of the corn light. You couldn't ask for a cheaper light bar assembly.

Electronic ballasts? The cheap non-dimmable LEDs seem to often have a series cap current limiter, which should be quiet.

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I want to ultimately time all yard lights off the street light, since its sensor is high enough up to avoid hillside shadowing.

I have an unobstructed view of it from the house, no matter what parking is on the street, so I figure an ambient AGC'd PD, with a

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It looks a bit tacky if the lights are on during a hot summer day. And they do consume almost the same energy as a CFL, around 15W per lamp. Times a dozen or so that's almost 200W dissipating needlessly.

All it would take is a darkness sensor. I mean, it's not rocket science, even our bathroom lights have that. It is super-easy with LEDs because they can unnoticeably be pulsed off, during which time either the LEDs themselves act as a zero-Dollar sensor or there is a li'l photodiode somewhere.

Sometimes I have the impression the marketing folks in the consumer lighting biz are asleep at the wheel. They are not visionary, mostly just reactionary like many in the med biz.

Most importantly, well focused optics and a long tube so the PD only sees that lamp.

And then something will build a nest in or on it :-)

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Ugh. So no PFC. That would normally not fly in a commercial setting where you have a whole barrage of those lights, in many jurisdictions then the total consumed power counts to determine whether it must have PFC. My last design has a PF well in excess of 0.9.

Yup, that plus a boost converter that regulates the current and you should have a nicely stable light source. Sometimes it's better to go a little higher than 12V unless the reason if a backup battery.

This one has a Royer oscillator in there and was spewing conducted EMI like a Harley with a sawed-off muffler.

Probably only need a long tube, flat black, maybe ABS slid inside of a metal pipe to keep it straight.

Probably do need a lens or flat glass on the end.

Ever since I had some kind of spider build a nest inside my A/C condensation drain and cause a flooded a hallway, I've been particularly conscious of such activity ;-)

Added a Kubota coupler so I could periodically blow it clean with a garden hose. ...Jim Thompson

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You need a dozen 15 watt lights at night? Do you own a polo field?

Us city boys don't understand people having all that space. Our property is 24 feet wide.

A friend of mine recently installed some dimmable LED strings, and had precisely this problem. They hashed badly enough to make AM radio unusable in the house.

'Twas a problem of several parts. The manufacturer chose to "dim" the LEDs via high-speed PWM - they're either on at full current, or entirely off. The PWM switcher had essentially no edge-softening or RFI filtering on it. Not too much of a problem when the LEDs were right next to the dimmer, but when there was 20' of wire between the wall dimmer and the illumination, the RF switching noise was horrendous.

When my friend asked the manufacturer about this dimming technique, he was told that it helps maintain a constant color temperature over the dimmable range, as the LEDs are always running at the same current if they're running at all. Apparently the LEDs shift color a bit if you run them at lower instantaneous currents.

He added a modest series choke / shunt cap filter to the output of the dimmer unit, and the problem went away without appreciably altering the color temperature of the lights. So, part of the problem was just that the manufacturer was cheap.

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Hmm, A squirt gun full of lemon concentrate, (maybe some water) into the eyes. Will the neighbor clean up the trash at least?

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Hi Joerg, Isn't the power factor mostly the cap current limit? Someone once told me that cap loading of the power lines was OK since most of the reactive load was inductive motors. (He was a fellow grad student, at the time there were several AC powered vacuum pumps chugging along behind me.)

George H.

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They don't need to all stay lit but the fact is that despite decades of rah-rah and blah-blah the industry has not delivered a reasonable automation system for existing buildings. So control can only be local at the lamp or local at the switch. Meaning they'd all get a darkness sensor and have to remain on all night. We have X10 right now but it's iffy, so only half the lamps stay on. But for that old system they must be incandescent, meaning 70W a pop.

I could take one of those suboptimal industrial designs from a HW store and hack it. But I don't have the time right now.

Ours is a smidgen larger :-)

Us country folk don't understand people willing to live in such cramped space. Seriously, I think much of San Francisco is quite beautiful but every time I get out of there and past the Carquinez Bridge I feel a heightened sense of freedom. This time a woman got stuck on the Bay Bridge with a blown tire, was afraid. Rightfully so, because lots of impatient city drivers blew by. They honked and nobody helped. So I did. We had to cross five lanes to get to the left-side exit onto Treasure Island. VERY scary but had to be done because the tire had begun to shred. Once up there it suddely was very peaceful again, the hectic city could only be seen in the distance. She could not understand why I thought that way, having always lived in big cities.

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The problem is there's diodes in the path. If you have a string that comes on hard at a certain voltage there will be almost no current flow and then it sets in hard. That will result in a poor power factor.

You can end up with something that looks similar to a saturating transformer current:

Considering that John's lights are only 0.51 it likely looks a lot worse than this.