I LOVE LED lights. I really LOVE LED lights. The combination of bright light vs low power usage make them a no-brainer in an RV. I have always wanted to have LED's throughout our trailer but their cost has made it prohibitive. No longer.
OUTSIDE LED's
My first foray into transforming the trailer started in the summer of '06. We were heading to the WBCCI International rally in Salem, OR. I had seen some people put LED's in their taillight in a thread on Airforums. I gave it a go.
I bought some of these:
Taking them apart gives you this:
So I take the lenses off of the trailer:
I wire them to the connectors and mount the LED platter to the housing. The way I did this was use wire nuts. I siliconed the wirenut to the housing and the platter to the wirenut. (I don't have a photo of this but you will see something similar later on. I then buttoned them up (this should be an animated GIF):
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I did the 'high' brake light also (another animated GIF):
I also did the license plate light. Here it is all done:
INSIDE LED's
Once again a couple of threads at Airforums served as reference and a way to pass on information. This thread and this thread. I knew about SuperBrightLeds but felt they were a little pricey. I found another source, www.ledwholesalers.com. I just purchased a single bulb to try it out. These are 1141 replacements:
I first tried this test bulb in a fixture. Here are the representative shots (I used warm white instead of bright white):
I was pleased enough with the results that I ordered bulbs for the entire trailer and replaced them. However there were a few bulbs outside that I needed to retrofit also.
These were the outside step lights and the torch (I call it the neighbor light because all it lights up is the neighbor's RV). I replaced those with 1141 equivalents but this time I got them in a more circular pattern, like a normal bulb. I also got these in bright white since they are outside. I got these bulbs, and some for my truck, from an eBay seller (ushd) at a very reasonable cost. Here is their eBay store.
Here is the step light:
Here is the torch:
Here they are all on:
One other thing that I did with the flat 1141's was put them in the backup lights:
Here are the backups at night. It is hard to tell in the photo but they are now bright enough to actually see something behind the trailer. Previously they were only good to warn people about the trailer moving.
In conclusion, I put in LED's for many reasons. Power savings, decreased heat, reliability, increased output and I think they are COOL!
We have yet to see about the power savings. Our trip to Yosemite will help prove it.
