Friday, June 26, 2009

First Mod - LED replacement bulbs

I love the View's curvy, modern Euro interior and upscale look of the under-cabinet lighting. But after a few nights of driveway camping, I discovered a couple of drawbacks--- first, all those under-cabinet lights are HOT halogen bulbs. Leave 'em on in the winter for a few hours and you've got some nice hand warmers, but doing that in the summer, and they're not much fun to sit under! Second, each of those hot bulbs need 10 watts of power (and there's 9 of them total)-- fine if you're plugged into electric at a campground, but a quick way to drain the coach batteries if you're not.

So, I did a few searches to my trusty View-Navion Yahoo Group site and found a number of other V-N owners using LED replacement bulbs from SuperBrightLEDs.com. The bulbs were a bit pricey ($12/ea) but they last a long time, generate no heat, and best of all, require much less battery power to run (all 9 lights will now require only 1.35 total amps per hour versus 7.5 total amp hours previously, so I now can run the lights all night long for about the same amount of battery power it took to run them only 1 hour before). Best of all, they still have a warm tint to them just like the halogens did.

They look a little odd, but once in the under-cabinet light fixture, you can't see much of a difference. The light itself is a slight bit more diffused, softer, and less intense-- actually, quite nice for spot accent lighting around the coach. Highly recommended product and company!

For those of you who have a View or Navion, here's the actual product number and picture:
It's a G4-xHP6-D Warm White bulb.

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