Thread: Led Guru's lend me your ear. I'll give it back...

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Last year was my first decent cemetery setup. Unfortunately I have a streetlight that lives in my yard which washed out 2 puny 150w floods.

This year I'm considering making some led spots and lighting everything separately. Here's my concern. I am struggling over what kind to get.
I want them to be fairly bright. I don't want them to have a real bright circle in the center of the light source surrounded by softer light.
I want them to say wash the entire gravestone.

That leaves me 2 options. Buy straw hat leds that are dimmer but have a much wider viewing angle, buy the diffused ones which are also a bit dimmer
and I would have no control over how diffuse they already are, or finally buy the normal ones and try to diffuse them myself.

What would you do?

Since I've never purchased 10mm or superbright leds I don't really have a frame of reference on how bright they will actually be.
If someone has some pics of their own stuff lit by led please link it, I would love to see it and it would give me a better idea of how they look in use.

Thanks

Anyone????

I don't have experience assembling LED spots, but I too have a street light in my yard, and it would always overpower my incandescent flood lights. I switched to PAR20 27-LED bulbs and covered up the streetlight from below with thick cardboard material (but allowed light to escape from above), and the results were incredible. You might also think about creating a light barrier to block out the ambient light.

I can tell you from experience that some of the stronger super-bright LED's out there can cast a good amount of light quite a distance.

I have some 10mm 70,000 mcd LED's that I'm putting together for spots (some blue, some red, no green yet) - when I decided to test how strong one LED was, I hooked one up to a 9v battery with a 470 ohm resistor (actually meant for 12v power), and it cast enough light for me to see it on a house about 50'-60' away.

I agree the degree of cast light is kind of tight, and as you've noted, there can be a bit of a "bulls eye" pattern to the light.
I've overcome this by using 4 LED's, and overlapped the light patterns - this gives a broader spread of light, and fills in the dimmer rings of the bulls-eyes fairly well.
A thought I've had in the past, but haven't tried yet, is to just use some clear, diamond-pattern diffuser that is sometimes found on florescent fixtures - I'm thinking this will spread the light more and eliminate dim spots.

Hope that gives you a bit of an idea.

BB gun works good... just kiddn, dont use a bb gun... use a 22... no really just kidding LOL