I have spent many a sleepless night pondering on the relative merits of solar and nuclear power, mains electricity vs. batteries, surgically altered optic fibre Christmas trees, captive glow worms or tea lights.
Finally, it became very clear. The solution seems to be LED lighting. It appears that in just a few years virtually all sizes of incandescent lamps will be dispatched to room 101. LED lighting technology is advancing all the time. Almost every type of standard lamp (bulb) package is now available in the form of LED with even very large sports stadiums being lit with this technology.
Some of the advantages of this technology include: up to 80% energy saving, much reduced heat output and extremely long service life - up to 50,000 hours is not unusual.
During 2011 I employed an small lamp in the form of little G4 Halogen type lamp in a display model the I made for the Cambridge University Department of Classical Archeology. This used just 2 Watts of power, but gave out a light level more like that of a regular 20 Watt Halogen lamp. But still, this was somewhat larger than I really wanted to fit in the current model.
The answer appear to be LED strip. This is essentially a strip of self-adhesive tape with lots of tiny LEDs wired along its length. You can used a minimum of 5cms (containing 3 LEDs) up to 5 metres. They can be powered by 12 volts DC, so they are perfect for my chosen power source of lead-acid batteries.
Whilst knowing that I could buy them online at http://www.simplyled.co.uk/ and similar places, I really wanted to experiment with them on the day I thought about it. After much faffing around, I discovered that my local Maplin store had them in stock, so I actually set foot outside of the studio and bought some. Within the hour, I was heating up the soldering iron to commence my tests.
The photograph shows the level of light coming from a 25cm strip of this material. The rest of the room was in complete darkness, so for such a tiny amount of input I got an impressive pool of light (certainly enough to install in various corners of the model.
The test was placed in a metal grille container (throwing very nice shadows) and left running overnight. It is still going now with no sign of generated heat. I will just let this run now to determine the expected battery life before recharging.
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