Re: Anyone moved to LED Lighting?

[don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Don Klipstein)]

In <y8OdnZecoc2f85XWnZ2dnUVZ_o-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Gordon
Burditt wrote:

>>A lot of new cars already come equipped with LED tail Lights. They are
>>very bright, and if one LED fails, you still have a lot of light. The
>
>According to state and/or Federal regulations, if you're driving
>with a tail light with one burned out LED, do you deserve a ticket,
>even if you still have a lot of light?

  If the light continues to meet the specification of upper and lower
limits of candela in all required directions, then there is no way to
deserve a ticket.  If the percentage of LEDs being failed is small,
chances are fairly good that the light will meet every letter of the legal
requirement.

>Sometimes what appears to be redundancy actually increases the
>failure rate.

  I would agree that a multiple LED light is likely to fall short of the
spec sooner than a single-LED one is.  However, since red LEDs usually
honestly achie 100,000 hour life expectancy (white ones generally don't),
I expect a multi-LED tail/brake light to meet the spec until the light has
been used a few tens of thousands of hours.  More, since most of the time
it will not being used at full power as a brake light.

  In a Crown Vic used as a police cruiser and after that as a taxicab,
lights may have to run for a few tens of thousands of hours.  Otherwise,
any decent brake/tail or turn signal LED light should have little trouble
outlasting the car unless it gets broken in a collision that does not
total the car.

 - Don Klipstein (don@xxxxxxxxx)