RV Lighting Upgrades and Repair in Yorba Linda

A standard 1141 incandescent bulb draws roughly 1.4 to 1.6 amps at twelve volts. Its LED equivalent draws roughly 0.15 to 0.25 amps for comparable output. That is an 85 percent reduction, and across a coach with twenty five interior fixtures the difference between all lights on incandescent and all lights on LED is on the order of thirty amps.

Thirty amps matters when you are off shore power. A 100 amp hour lead acid house battery gives you about 50 usable amp hours. On incandescent, running half your lights for four hours consumes most of that. On LED, the same usage is a small fraction of it. For anyone who dry camps, lighting conversion is the highest return per dollar of any electrical change available.

The secondary benefit is heat. Incandescent fixtures put nearly all of their energy into heat, inside a vehicle that is already fighting to stay cool, and in fixtures whose lenses and housings were not designed for a modern insulation package. Melted lens rings on older ceiling fixtures are extremely common and they are a fire risk.

Three causes, in order of frequency. Converter ripple, voltage drop, and dimmer incompatibility.

Converter ripple is the biggest one. A twelve volt converter rectifies shore power to DC, and cheaper single stage converters leave significant AC ripple on the DC bus. Incandescent bulbs are thermal devices and simply ignore it. LEDs are electronic and respond to it, which shows up as visible flicker or an audible buzz, and over time it stresses the driver circuit inside the LED and shortens its life. The tell is that the flicker appears on shore power and disappears on battery. That is a converter problem, not a lighting problem.

Voltage drop is second. Twelve volt systems drop voltage over distance in a way that 120 volt systems do not, and RV factory wiring is frequently undersized for the run length. A fixture at the rear of a forty foot coach can see 11.4 volts when the panel reads 12.8. Some LED drivers dim, flicker or drop out below about 11 volts. Measuring at the fixture rather than at the panel is the entire diagnosis.

Dimmer incompatibility is third. A rheostat style dimmer designed for incandescent loads does not work correctly with electronic LED drivers. LED dimming in a coach should be pulse width modulated at a frequency high enough to avoid visible flicker, with fixtures rated for it.

• Flicker only on shore power: converter ripple, not the fixture
• Dim or dropping out at the far end of the coach: voltage drop on an undersized run
• Buzz when dimmed: incompatible dimmer with an electronic driver
• One fixture out and the rest fine: connection at the fixture or a failed driver
• Whole circuit out: fuse, ground, or a chafed conductor at a slide or a hinge
• Color mismatch between fixtures: mixed color temperature, correct by matching all fixtures

In layers, the same as any good interior, but with the twelve volt system as the constraint. Ambient lighting from ceiling fixtures on a dimmer, task lighting under cabinets and over the galley and reading positions, and accent lighting in toe kicks, valances and display areas.

Color temperature should be consistent across the coach. Mixing a 2700 Kelvin warm fixture next to a 4000 Kelvin neutral one reads as a fault even to people who cannot name what is wrong. We specify a single color temperature for the whole interior and match it, and we favor higher color rendering fixtures so that the wood, fabric and finishes actually look like their samples.

Everything powered is billed at our mechanical and electrical rate of $260 per hour. A straight bulb for bulb conversion is at the bottom of the published $250 to $2,500 range. A layered design with new fixtures, dimming, under cabinet and accent circuits pulled through finished walls is at the top, and it is dramatically cheaper if it is done while an interior is already open for other work.