I’m considering using addressable leds for lighting a 5m x 3m garage, which will be an office conversion. Low profile, and programmable make them appealing vs down lighters which will be equally as expensive. (Ish). Does anyone know how to determine what quantity of leds should be used to illuminate a room? Or have people done similar projects?
I was thinking of a full circle of 5m, 3m, 5m, 3m. Does this have the capability of being enough to brighten a room at (30 per metre/60 per metre)?
That’s 16 metres so either 480, or 960 leds. Sounds like quite a lot …? I guess power consumption will be variable dependant on configuration and type. And for this sort of project I wonder if 12v would be better to try to reduce current?
Is there anything else I’d need to consider for a project like this? especially to keep things safe?
I’ll probably use some ESP8266 chips as controllers as I already have a collection of them, and then presumably I’d need a good power supply wired in.
Consider power usage here. I was thinking the same thing a while back, but if you use white light, even not a full bright for each LED, your talking near 60 amps for lighting your garage with 960 leds (it would also be brighter than the sun). I’ve got 460, and it pulls between 3 and 10 depending on the program, but that is color based with brightness set less than 100 in all cases.
Honestly, it’s a good idea, but you can probably get by with less than 100 if you wanted and still have plenty of light, pulling somewhere around 5 amps then. Still a lot for lighting a room though.
When I did the work, I thought up using the 12 or 24 LED adafruit rings with a BLE or WiFi controller for each “light”. The 12 ring pry puts out about 75 watts equiv (total guess though), and if you use a bunch of those in a can type setup, you can effectively light a room. Not the cheapest solution, and you would have to find a way to space them. You would also have to code them up with a custom controller. I would consider the Photon for the REST and cloud backend. It would be fairly easy to build a setup to do the light control if you piggy back on their framework. And you don’t have to know IP’s or BLE addresses. Or get a controller that can do Zigbee and mimic the HUE lights setup.
It’s a big effort. Safe, pry using way too much power, but would be pretty cool. Come up with a room lighting framework, and I’ll totally piggy back and do my own.
I doubt it will be less expensive than recessed lights. you can do recessed cans for around $800 installed. A good quality power supply is about $60, good quality lights are about $120, you’ll nee something to put the strips in so it doesn’t look dorky. I used aluminum channel which was about $300 for 10m. $24 for the mcu, and through in another 50 in misc parts.
$650 if you only have to buy everything once. and that doesn’t include installation.
Honestly, don’t use strips. I think in the long run its harder to get what you want. Trying to mimic bulbs is pry the best bet, so rings or short individual assemblies. But like Mr. Happy said, it’s gonna be pricey. Better off just doing cans and putting hue bulbs in. It will be saleable this way too. There are a lot of light projects I want to do, but some of them would make it harder to sell later.
I just recently completed a project similar to this for a cabin in the mountains. I used about 1m of warm white LEDs per fixture. Outside lights were custom built with some 1x4s and plexiglass type material. Inside lights were also about 1m of LEDs housed in cheapish ceiling fixtures from home depot ($22 for a pack of 2 fixtures). I used 12v 120LEDs/M non addressable strips and cut them to fit. According to the solar charge controller the lights were pulling 6.5 amps total for 7 fixtures. I don’t have a picture of the fixtures themselves but here is an overall picture from a few nights ago. https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM1Lty2690cRrCK5f4inH6HJc-2MWs9ztRPJ4cB-ReqpJn5IZ0W-AMAVFPbngPQ5A?key=ekJBci0zbEdPWG12OGtfbU53UmxNMEp4Mm5TT0Zn
For work space lighting I would take RGB+W like those http://www.szledcolor.com/productshow.asp?id=921&sid=196
43W/m translate in about 20W color and 20W white. 20W LED are roughly 100W conventional bulb brightness for 1m - should be more than sufficient.
WRT to those strips: You can easily address them as WS2812B; you get a really clean white (much better than mixed out of RGB), AND you can add any color on top.
Change your code that you address all odd pixels as colors and all even pixels as white. The white pixels have also 3x8bits, so using FastLED is simple:
Thanks for the comments guys (and keep them coming!) The problem with using cans / bulbs is the roof is low, and I don’t want fixtures coming down unless necessary. Sounds like a mix of concern and encouragement here - so I’ll put some more thought into how it could work.
My first concern was that I wouldn’t get enough light from them - but it sounds like they will pack plenty of punch at up to 20W per metre, but one of the reasons I like the idea of addressable is that it means I can ‘move’ the light around the room selectively. And of course, I can control the brightness along them as well.
So I’m still keen, but I’ll put in more effort to go through concerns and work out costings before commencing anything
@Juergen_Bruegl - Thanks for the Dual Colour/White suggestion. That definitely would make a lot of sense! (I’d seen these before and wondered why anyone would by such a thing, and now I understand!)
