Sunday 1 December 2013

Sunday 1st Dec - Replace Interior Campervan (ambulance) lights with LEDs

Last night I decided to take an interior light unit out of the roof and try to work out how to rewire it for LEDs.  I'd already brought a 5m stretch of LED strip which could be cut and rewired into lots of smaller sections.  So now I needed to quickly learn how to cut, rewire and solder LEDs.  Turns out it was not too difficult.

The single interior light I took out came apart quite easily. I then cutting out and unpicked most of the items not required from the original fluorescent strip unit and simply left the switches and the black / red wires.

Time to get the soldering iron out.

The LED strip I brought was ok to cut every 3 bulbs so I trimmed it to length and began soldering the new 12v wires onto the strip. It wasn't simple intially but worked ok. Wiring it to a battery charger I could see I had some success although my solder joints were poor. I re-soldered, then repeated again with a second strip to fill the box with light.  I connected the wires to the initial input wires and we had a light I could try in the ambulance.  To my surprise, it worked first time and as I'd hoped filled the van with way more light than the old 8w fluorescent strips!!!

So this morning I stripped and cut 12 more cables, got some more male and female connectors so I could remove the lamp holders faster in future and set about removing the other 4 holders from the van.

It didn't take long once I was in the swing.  My soldering was way better, my cables all ready, only one bank of LED's which had some diode issues.  An hour or so later I had a van with 5 working lights jam packed with LEDs = way more light and way less power than the ten fluorescent strips I removed.

So here is the end result (taken in the dead of night). And now I've got a place light enough to work in over the winter nights.


Next steps are bolting in the new seats, getting the old vents removed and filled and then putting in the mains hookup. So it's time to buy a mains RCD.

No comments:

Post a Comment