January 2012
I'm looking for help locating or building a super bright exit/picture/display style bulb with an E26 base for my mom.
My 95 year old mother has macular degeneration in both eyes. She still enjoys reading but finds it harder by the day. Her main complaint is that she can't get enough light on the printed page.
I'm asking for help to locate and/or build a bulb with what I know as ultra-bright LEDs. It will throw the equivalent of 200 [fairly cold] incandescent watts of light down onto her page. I'm no engineer, but am handy with a soldering iron and multimeter. Can anyone help me?
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I'm reading between the lines here, so I apologize up front if I'm in the wrong universe with my answer.
I see 2 main approaches (off the top of my head) - build an LED illumination thingy from scratch, or buy LED spotlight bulbs 'off the shelf' and fabricate whatever you need to get enough light.
Get It Off The Shelf
A fairly long search on google found all sorts of possibilities, if you only want to get some E26 base bulbs and create an array of <n> LED spotlight bulbs to supply he desired light level. If you assume your 200W incandescent bulb puts out something in the neighborhood of 3000 lumens, then you need about 7 or 8 420-lumen spots like the Grainger 3CRA2 (Optiled model 1503050217) - which Grainger sells for $45 each… Or just 3 of the 6XWKD (GE Lighting LED20P38S830/25) which puts out 1050 lumens (at $60 each) would also supply the desired light output.
If you want to go this way, google is probably your best friend. (Along with eBay). Use "LED spotlight" or "LED high-power" or "LED 20W" (or even "LED e26", which is what I started with).
Build It Yourself
Googling for 20W LEDs, I found www.hero-ledstore.com/heroled-20w-led-c-2_184.html with all the parts you'd need to make a 20W LED lamp (but that's gonna run you about $74 and you still need 2 of them (apparently they are 1600 lumens each). Interestingly, the parts to make a 50W (4000 lumen) 'system' are only about $175 - and you'd only need one of those… There are other options out there also, I'm sure, as a google for "high power LED" returned about 78 million hits "wink." The thing there is that you need a constant-current source to feed the LEDs with, not a constant voltage (but with voltage limits, IIRC).
