Tuesday, 11 December 2018

LED pavement lights in Blackpool


We found these LED devices on the promenade sea wall by Blackpool Pleasure Beach. They seemed to be worked by small solar panels. The LED I posted about a couple of weeks ago was running 0.02A at 1.5V which is a power of 0.03W or 30mW. There are 6 LEDs so let's estimate 180mW. In peak sunlight, the Sun reaches about 1600 Watts per square metre. On a dull day in Winter maybe 800 Watts per square metre. The solar cell can't be bigger than 2cm x 3cm or 6 x 10^-4 square metres. That would then generate 0.48W in Winter. But the cell doesn't drive the LEDs directly because you want them to come on after dark. It must charge a battery. Then we'd be into calculating Amphours charging versus Amphours discharging.