LED Lighting
Overview
Overview
LED Lighting Overview
About LED Lighting
About LED Lighting
There was a time when lighting a campsite properly meant deciding what else you were not going to run that night. Incandescent and halogen fittings drew real current, so people rationed them, put up with one dim light over the table and went to bed early.
LED moved the constraint. A whole camp's worth of lighting now draws less in an evening than the fridge does in an hour, which means the question stopped being whether you can afford to run it and became where the light should actually go.
That turns out to be the harder question. Light in the wrong place is worse than no light. A bright fitting at eye level under an awning wipes out everyone's night vision and makes the dark beyond it darker. A floodlight aimed at the ground three metres away is more useful than one twice as bright pointed at the horizon.
So the collection is organised around where light needs to be rather than around what it costs. Overhead fittings for inside a canopy or van. Strip lighting tucked under a shelf or an awning rail where the source stays hidden. Spot and flood for outside the vehicle, where the beam angle matters more than the lumen count. Sealed fittings for boats, where salt gets into anything that is not properly built for it.
Then the parts that decide how much use any of it gets: switches, dimmers, sensors and the harnesses that put a circuit together properly rather than as a patch job. A dimmer on the awning light is worth more than a second fitting, and a sensor near the canopy door is worth more than either when you arrive after dark with both hands full.
Work out where you need light before you work out how much. The second question answers itself once the first one is settled, and the power budget that used to drive the whole decision barely registers now.




