About three years ago, I picked up some AGM batteries off Craigslist. My original intent was that I wanted to rewire a common house lamp to use 12v LED lighting. The idea being, naturally, that in a power outage I would have a ‘normal’-looking source of light, rather than the stark and brutal harsh lighting that we get from just standing a battery lantern on top of the refrigerator or something.
So, my initial forray was…meh. I wound up buying an adapter to let me use a bayonet-type socket in place of a normal screw-in bulb socket...basically following these directions. But, in that case, it turned out there was a much easier way to do things – simply buy an LED desk lamp and remove the ‘wall wart’ AC-to-DC inverter and simply run it straight off 12v. Which I did…and it worked awesomely.
And that’s fine. My own testing showed that off of a battery jump pack the lamp would run non-stop for over a week. But try lighting an entire room with a desk lamp…it’s not really up to the task. So, I had a cheapo ‘dorm quality’ lamp sitting in the corner that I decided to experiment on.
First thing was to cut off the existing plug, determine where + and – were (you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right on the first try), and attaching some method of connecting to the battery. Bare wires work, but if you can make things neater, why not?
Next step was the bulb. Here you can see the previous bulb, and the bayonet adapter, that I had used. It worked, yes…but it didn’t put out enough light to seem like the lamp was ‘normal’ in its output. The other bulb is a Made-in-China (just like Covid!) bulb ‘designed’ for low voltage 12v systems. A somewhat more elegant solution than a bayonet adaptor and odd-attachment bulbs. All this required is a) bulb and b) changing the plug on the wire.
So, hows it look? Not bad.
(Yes, I have Archer on DVD. Do you not?)
An interesting arrangement, and well built, but 12V conversions are not necessary now, not with the quality DC-AC inverters available. I put a small bank of Trojan batteries down under the house, charged off a solar array out on the carport roof, and then ran a mains voltage extension lead up through the floor to a double power point. A sparky did the actual wiring of the point and it’s all legal since the extension lead simply plugs into the inverter.
12V suffers from voltage drop, which limits the length of the runs you can make and requires the batteries to be close to the appliance. Also having mains power means I can run a small lead from my power-point to the fridge it I want, since the inverter is pure sine wave and rated to 2000W. Of course you’ll need a reasonable battery bank to power that but banks can be upgraded as the need arises.
GMTA.
In y ample spare time, my next project, after another little rumbler hereabouts, is rigging solar panels to a couple of seldom-used windows and a part of a skylight (a workaround, as I don’t control access to my roofage), thence to a couple of actual solar storage AGM batteries, and finally to a power inverter to keep a mini-fridge, microwave, as well direct-wire a CB and a string of LED lights ready to rock, for SHTF contingencies.
Gotta’ Love Archer!
I made up a couple of these using rebuilt jump packs and clamp work lights when you posted this last time. they clamp right to the handle. I’ve been meaning to do this to a regular light but I’ve been using a small 75w inverter and with 60w led bulbs in the lamps I’m getting about 5 nights at 6hrs a night before the inverter beeps.