Ban wrote:

Watson A.Name - Watt Sun wrote:

Hey, I agree with you. But instead, I would have used higher voltage

lamps, two in parallel. Decent LEDs were hard to get back in the
'70s. Another solution might be to use neon lamps.


You mean flourescent lights. neon lamps need a high voltage transformer. :-(

Neon lamps need a current limiting resistor, something like 47k or so,
but not a transformer. Some of the screw base neons have the resistor
built into the base. Some of the ones I've seen have a standard sized
'edison' lamp base with a glass envelope that's about twice the size of
the base. They last something like tens of thousands of hours. They
would solve the problem of burned out filaments.

you will not want them for emergency lights, as they are often the cause of
the emergency themselves.
BTW also fluorescent lights have many shortcomings, in a cold
environment(Alaska?) they extinguish and won't start at even moderately cold
temperatures. They need some electronics inside the socket and finally last
not longer than special longlife bulbs, that is 6000h, which is not even 1
year. Of course the efficiency is much higher even if you add the loss of
the electronics (which is usually not accounted for).

Here in my building we have flourescent lights in the emergency lights, but
they are always off and only light up at power loss. They have a 12Ah 12V
gel-battery inside and will power the 5W lamp for not even 24h, not enough
if we have a blackout like in NY. But fortunaterly that has never happened
so far.

ciao Ban
Bordighera,Italy