LED Pool Light

[DZ]

Hey guys, I have a question about lighting for a pool. My pool has an incandescent light that went out recently. I pulled the fixture a few weeks ago to find that the bracket that holds the lamp in place is just done. I stopped by a pool store to find that I'm looking at about 400 to 500 to have the whole thing replaced. So I've been kicking around the idea of putting in an LED light for the pool, which of course I plan on building myself. I was thinking of an array of about 65 red led's, 50 green led's and about 70 blue led's. I guess my question is about the mcd's. Seems that I can get most colors in 4000, 9000, or around 15,000 mcd's. Which would you use, knowing the quantity of LED's I plan on using? Or maybe I should just replace the pool light with a water-proof laser projector!

[Ian]

Lasers would be quite amazing to see under water at night. The water in the pool will diffuse the laser color and make your pool glow.

I say go for it!

[buffo]

That would be an expensive pool light! Also, from my limited experience shining lasers into tanks of water, the beam doesn't really diffuse all that much. You can still clearly see the beam in the water. Still, that might be a cool effect in it's own right.

David - be careful that your old lamp housing isn't allowing water to leak out of your pool where it can collect behind the liner. That could be *very* bad...

Adam

[James Lehman]

My first suggestion to you about the use of LEDs is to make yourself a burn-in fixture.
I've made several LED projects; some of them are blocks of 100 LEDs in a 10x10 square. After putting all that together, it's a real bummer to see failed LEDs in the middle of the block that you can't change unless you tear the whole thing apart!

Burn in your LEDs for DAYS before you decide that they are good.

As far as MCD goes, that's usually a lot of crap. It is based on human color vision, so you can not get a reasonable comparison of one color to another. It is NOT real output power in watts of light.

There are many cheap LED vendors on eBay that will sell you bags of hundreds of LEDs. Like I said before burn-them-in!

Once you have a fixture of many LEDs you can pot it in clear epoxy and make it totally water proof.

http://www.akrobiz.com/led/i_03.html

http://www.akrobiz.com/led/

James.

[DZ]

David - be careful that your old lamp housing isn't allowing water to leak out of your pool where it can collect behind the liner. That could be *very* bad...

Hey Adam, its a concrete pool with marcite, no liner. The lamp housing just screws in place with a cord that runs through a tube under the foundation to the light switch. I'm not sure if the tube is sealed at the pool end or not, I guess if it is, I'll have to drain it, and run a new line since I'll need 4 conductors, instead of the 3 that are there.


Wow James! Thanks for the great information, and added motivation to do it myself! I plan on using the same lamp housing, which is sealed air tight, just mount up a board with all the "burned in" leds and wire up a transformer. Maybe some simple controls over the lights to give it some "flair!"

Ian, I might just have to try that someday, if the beam doesn't diffuse to much, I"ll just run laser shows on the bottom of my pool. Damn, I bet that would look neat!

[James Lehman]

If you plan on mixing R,G,B LEDs, get one of those cheesy computer fan speed controllers. Some of them are three way; just made for your LED project! They are PWM controllers for DC motors. They work very well as LED dimmers.

James.

[bulldog_99_00]

If you want to stick with RGB, you can also check out more powerful integrated RGB units like this :
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?...m=260243742819

[mikkojay]

Here is a funky ebay pool light show