Common Sense versus Easy

Hi all,

I have the requirement to wire up 8 LED marker lights, four bright red, four infrared: the amount of power they will draw is absolutely tiny my best calculation less than one amp. Do I;

Option one : just use a switch to turn them on, with a fuse in the circuit to prevent shorting of the cables, if anything goes wrong.

Option two: put a relay in the system and do it " properly" As if it were a set of extra lamps/driving lights/foglamps etc.

Has anybody done this before ? how did you do it ?

Thanks - Zaid

Relay is not necessary with such pissy current draw mate.

Option 1, you only need a suitably sized relay if the load is greater than the switch rating. Less to go wrong as well.

Just hard wire with a switch or if you change a few existing park lights to led also put them on the same circuit

agree with the others, option #1. as long as you fuse the link and with less than 1 amps current draw I wouldn't worry about the relay.

Thanks guys,:clapping:
I thought option one might be the easiest, and the most sensible.
But you know sometimes it's better to check, rather than just blindly blunder onwards.:1087:

Where did you get the IR lamps from out of interest bud?

Hi Fracster,
I have not yet got the infrared LEDs, however all I was going to do was order them online from either RS, Maplin's or Farnell components. What I was going to do is just drill a very small hole into the sidelight lamp casing and epoxy resin the LED into the hole, then put a quick connect in the cable, to allow changing of regular bulbs easily. Unless you know of a better method ?

No, but it is something i`m looking into.

Got something in mind for watching nocturnal animals from the comfort of the car rather than led down in the woods. Just researching on possible side effects to my night vision scope.

To be honest, i`m looking at getting IR filters over a standard worklight, just to see if it works or not.

You can get a 12 V security infrared lamps, for use with night vision security cameras. These are available either as a normal filament lamp with a filter or as LED Cluster lamps. Haven't tried either but have seen both in action. The LED ones look reasonably slim, pull very few watts and run very cool especially with the thick filter that is required for the filament lamps - I'm sorry I can't be more specific I just know :)

If you want to have a play try and find somebody with a Sony camcorder since some of them have and infrared illuminator for night filming, the same camcorder can be used to look at the brightness of an infrared source/lamp. The camcorder sensor detects infrared very well......