You’ve probably seen rope lights around before, perhaps being used as path lighting in a dark movie theater or winding around a tree as a holiday decoration. Those are just a couple of the many uses of rope lights. If you haven’t seen rope lights, think of Christmas string lights; rope lights are like those except that in rope lights the light bulbs are inside a plastic tube instead of attached to the outside of a power cord.
That’s basically what a rope light is; tiny light bulbs in a malleable plastic sheath that acts like a rope. The wattage of each light bulb on the rope is about .5 watts, and they’re most commonly spaced about an inch away from each other. A rope light with the latter requirements consumes around 6 watts for foot. At that rate it would take some 10 feet of rope lights to consume the same amount of power as a single 60 watt incandescent light bulb.
You can see that rope lights barely use any electricity. Coupled with that is their rated lifetime of around 25,000 hours. Even using them four hours each day, it would take some 17 years for these micro LED lights to burn out. The “rope” in rope lights comes in two common sizes: 3/8 inch and ½ inch. The only difference between these two sizes is the thickness of the plastic jacket; brightness and energy usage are not affected. If you want to check out rope lights of differing brightness, look for the watts per foot. A 5.5 watts per foot rope light is brighter than one with 3.36 watts per foot.
Uses for rope lights are almost endless. Place it along shelves, mantles, and use it to accent bookcases, cabinets, doors, and even windows. Dark places like the inside of a closet are great for rope lights, as they avoid glare and provide nice indirect light. Outdoor applications include trailing them along decks and deck railings, or illuminating stairs/steps/pathways.
Written by Blair E. and originally submitted to ArticlesBase.com.
LEDs could be seen everywhere today – on markets outdoor, on the street, in every apartment and office. One amazing solution is the LED rope which is made by connected little LEDs which are made like a string or rope to light little emissions over large area.
One problem with LED ropes is that they are pretty expensive. This is so because of the manufacturing process of the LED rope light bulbs which is different from the incandescent and krypton bulbs. LED light bulbs use no filament and are solid state light bulbs.
However LED rope lights comes with two big benefits – 10 years of life and almost no heat emissions. This enables the user to use them in places where they can’t be easily replaced and where the heat of the conventional rope lights could be a problem.
One use for the LED rope lights is for commercial applications. They provide good look for years without the need to be replaced or maintained and their physical life is in almost every case longer than the need for the commercial application and this makes them very attractive to the investors who need quality and reliability without the need of maintains and new expenses. They are usually one time payment for a specific need and today in many cases this is more valuable than the price the costumer needs to pay.
The question you as a costumer should ask yourself is this – do I need quality or do I need low cost? This economic issue is just a standard quality/price problem which we face everyday in every market. However we should not only think about a current solution to our needs but solution which will pay in time and it will prove itself reliable. In fact there is more to it. In some cases the energy consumption could be lowered to only 10-20% of the energy cost that the conventional rope lights will have. That means that for a longer period of time it is possible that the lower price for energy costs could actually pay out the price for the LED rope lights. This is so because with LED rope lights you will for example pay only 10% of the energy cost of the traditional rope lights and in time the other 90% will become more than the price of the LED rope you purchased.
Now let’s say you want to make a new Xmas decoration for a big commercial enterprise which will gather many people. If you want low cost you could use conventional rope lights but soon if some of the lights or a whole rope fails this could put into jeopardy the whole idea behind the use of these lights. If you use these lights outdoor in the cold this may not happen but Xmas is every year and if you want the same lights to be used you will surely want to use LED rope lights to ensure reliability.
We need to keep in mind the life of the product our ideas depends on. Regular rope lights are rated to have 25,000 hours life. LED rope lights are rated for 100,000 and if we do the math – this is 4 times longer period. However if the environment around the lights is with high temperature the life of the regular rope lights vastly shortens but if the temperature is not too high the LED rope lights will not be affected because of their low heat emissions. Higher temperature is hazardous for all electrical and electronic products but if they themselves provide low emissions of heat this will enable them to endure higher environment temperature without endangering their normal operation.
Now let’s talk about power consumption. Energy cost money and if we find a way to use it more efficiently we save money. Regular rope lights use around 3 watts per foot and LED rope lights 1 watt. This is three times difference. Maybe few watts are not an important matter for you but think about them as an entire working system that you want to build. If they work all the time it will not be the same if you pay for 1 kW or for 3 kW if we say that your system is 1000 feet long. Or on a larger scale we can think about how efficient we as human beings use the energy on which we depend.
Using less energy (power consumption) does not mean that the luminance level of LED rope lights will be lower. Quite the opposite – LED rope lights are brighter than the traditional rope lights. That means that they make even more light with less energy and it again bring us to the question for their high efficiency and of course to the question – will their higher cost be paid in time from expenses. This is a matter of simple math which everyone can do for himself taking in account the numerical values I discussed.
Some LED rope lights could be powered on 12 V or 24 V and this provides some good benefits. For example you can use them on your car, boat or everywhere else where you could only power them from batteries. One good solution is to connect them to a battery charged from a solar system. During the day the solar system will transform the light into electrical charge and it will collect it into the battery and during the night the battery could power up the LED rope which could be for example a commercial advertisement into a shop or even a nice decoration making your free time at home more enjoyable. Imagine a night club with all the light free of cost. This could be possible with the use of a photovoltaic solar panel systems and the LED technology. It will in fact mean that you transform the light from the Sun in a way you could use it later and this is exactly what photovoltaic solar panels are all about. However even with the new energy sources the efficient way of using the energy is a high priority and LED rope lights and the whole LED technology could be the future of the artificial light we will use.
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