Light 'Em Up!

Well, the LED Strip Lighting arrived today, and I must say I am excited to see what these will look like installed. They come unassembled, but were very easy to put together. The package consisted of a 1 meter long aluminum channel, a four foot strip of LED lights, a plastic diffuser that snaps over the channel, snap on plastic channel ends, a power brick and a connecting cable.

The company is called EnvironmentalLights.com and they have a great website that provides all the info you need on these lights. They also currently have an A+ rating with the local (San Diego) better business bureau. I always like talking on the phone with the vendor when dealing with some new product, and both their sales and tech support folks were very friendly and helpful. I'll definitely keep them in mind if I ever need under cabinet lighting, or want to do something else cool with LEDs.

I went with the warm light LEDs to compliment the interior of the teardrop. These things are incredibly bright for how small they are, as the video below shows. I actually misstated the light equivalent - EACH fixture puts out the same amount of light as a 40 incandescent bulb, but at only 5 watts! And they are rated for 50,000 hours, or almost 6 years of non-stop use - I'll definitely get my mileage out of them.

To put them together, I cut the channel and diffuser into two, 20 inch long pieces and drilled mounting holes in the aluminum on each end. I had the company solder a set of wires to either end of the LED strip. That way I could measure and trim them from the middle with a pair of scissors (there was a little left over). You just make the cut along any of the marked points that are spaced every inch - you don't even have to terminate the ends.

I then peeled off the backing to expose the adhesive and laid each strip into the channel. Snap on the diffuser and end pieces, wire them up, and that's it!

I have the lights packaged up and will ship out to the teardrop builder on Monday. He said that the trailer frame arrived Friday, and they will get started on the build this week. He sent me a rough sketch of the trailer profile:

Here you see the passenger side with the leveling jacks at the rear, window and door placement, as well as the position of the twin bunk & framing inside the cabin. I'm going to see if I can transfer this profile into Google Sketchup and get a 3D model out of it.