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led vs flourecents

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fcylinderrules:
Hi everyone,
have been trying out some LED's for the first time.....had some old outside Halogen spot lamps with reflectors, thought I'd buy a few LED boards and power units just to see how it goes....the idea being that is when I build my new workshop I'd like to use LED's instead of Florescent lamps......
the boards I bought have 48 LED's at 12v, but very disappointed with the light output.....I did buy the correct voltage power transformers....
Are there different type's of LED's, these were supposed to be super bright, can't remember the wattage......(I'll still be able to use them around the farm but was hoping for better).........
I did go see some out side flood lamps in a DIY store and those (10w) seemed much brighter than mine....
I like the idea of power saving with the LED's and you can stuff them everywhere and in the corner's......

any experience of this problem or should I just wait until they get the whole LED lamp thing working properly........
many thanks  Clogs

CrazyModder:
In my experience, LEDs are pretty fickle. They need superb cooling (mostly by tacking them onto big aluminium coolers or whatever) or they die quickly. And the lumen output, while good on paper, just doesn't seem to do it for me.

Then, different LEDs (even if they have the same model number) often look quite differently - different color tones.

So... well, you can try and ymmv, but I'd go with good old fashioned lamps instead, really.

AdeV:
I, on the other hand, love LEDs.... although the only ones I've tried on a machine so far, I miscalculated the voltage and have burned a large number of the individual LEDs out (oops). While they were working, though, they gave out great light - I used 4x 12v panels of 48 LEDs, glued inside an old filament bulb holder. You couldn't look directly at them whilst they were on, and they lit the work up just fine. Then the magic smoke started to come out...

From a house point of view, I'm completely converted. Most of my bulbs are now LED, I've got 3 traditional filament bulbs left which are getting changed to LEDs as soon as they blow, and a couple of CFLs which I hate.

For machine work, you want to get bright white or daylight white IMHO, warm white is just too yellow. You may also find the reason for your home-made flood being "too dim" is because the LED is in the wrong place for the parabolic reflector; LEDs are, as you know, much lower profile than bulbs, so the reflector needs to be a different shape to pick up all the light. The only way around that would be to make a "bulb" of LEDs (say, 4 or 6, arranged in a ring facing outwards), and mounted in roughly the same place as a bulb's filament would be. The awkwardness of arranging the LEDs like that would probably make it easier and cheaper just to buy a dedicated unit...

dawesy:
We have led strip lights at work. They are very bright but the light spread is very narrow. They are about 5' long and 3"wide mounted about 8' high but the light pool on the ground is only about 4'-5' wide. They aren't cheap either.
As direct lighting over a work bench, lathe etc they would be ok though. 
I am looking at swapping my fluorescent's for led downlighting but I'll need quite a few to keep current light levels.

chipenter:
I also have LEDs useing downlighters and outside work lights the type with a large square LED of up to 50what , are realy bright and a good spread you see stars iff you look directly at them .

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