Bike Light: LED vs. Halogen

[Kialkia]

Hi, found your community on the search. I am using homemade 20w halogen bike lights and would like to replace them with LED's to increase run time. I usually use one 20w, sometimes two at once. My battery is a 14.4 LiIon so I am overvolting the lights. Two lights at once puts out quite a bit of light so I am spoiled. What kind of LED arrangement would get me an equivalent light output? And one more question has anybody experience with electric skateboards? I want to buy one good and found in the Republic of Skaters but can't choose.

[EricS]

Very hard to convert Watts (power, or energy used per second) to lumens (brightness) due to the fact halogens make more heat, so therefore typically use about 4 times the energy to give the same brightness. Your 40 W system could be giving you 500 to 700 lumens (total guess), and with LEDs you could get that and only draw maybe 10 W. If you are using a 14.4 Volt power supply, the current draw would be 2.8 Amps with your dual beam set up. That's a lot. Running 10 W of LEDs (you could have more than one with this much power) you would only draw 0.7 Amps. Still a fair bit for a bike light, and heat management is still needed.

I used to make my own bike lights with various incandescent bulbs, but for LED, I like commercial units. The circuitry to provide safe thermal management and charging, and various power levels, waterproof casings, etc. are all so good now on modern bike lights.

Here is a locally made (for us, in our provence) light I just ordered for example. It uses a 3.7 V Li-ion and still delivers 800 lumens.

https://mountainlabgear.ca/products/x80 ... hlight-kit

Not sure if I'm making sense, but I guess the short story is: LEDs give us better bike lights.

Cheers,

Eric