Anyone evertried these lights inside your trailer for reading lights ect. I'm sure they would draw minimum power and may be nice and bright?

http://cgi.ebay.com/White-LED-Truck-Traile...1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-White-LED-Back-up-...1QQcmdZViewItem

My experience with LED lights for reading is that they don't give uniform illumination across a surface. If you want to check this out, many marine stores (I know the West Marine in Bremerton, WA does) have a display of a variety of lights that work.

That is not to say that all LED lights are equal, I'm sure they aren't.

The real advantage of LED lights is their resistance to vibration failure, since they don't have a fragile filament heated white hot. As to their conversion efficiency from electrical power to light, I have read they are just so-so. Better than incandescent, worse than flourescent.

At about forty bucks, that's only about half a fuel filling on my Diesel Jimmy. If it doesn't work out as a reading light it might be just the ticket for general overhead lighting, then you could use a small halogen or fluorescent for reading.

It would also be a cool back-up light.

Since I'm a early morning person and my wife is a late evening type and we both like to read, we have a couple of those book lights that clip to the top of a book page. Ours are LED, but have a special reflector that spreads out the light to overcome the blotchyness fairly well. You see them for sale in book stores as well as other places.

I generally agree with what Loren is saying about the characteristics of white LED lights, although the efficiency varies quite a bit between individual applications and can be much better than incandescents. This does sound like an interesting application.

One problem with eBay sources is that there is often not much real information. For a typical LED truck backup light, I looked at the Grote website and found SuperNova®, Oval, Dual System, LED Back-up Lamps; they draw 0.33A (presumably each), which is only 4W, which sounds promising as an interior lamp. If they are really four times as bright as my 1 W LED flashlight, I think they might be quite effective.

thanks, thought I would bounce the idea of some. They could also make good lights for above the stove and sink and take up vitually no space.