Light bulb suggestions

[flick]

My layout room is progressing nicely. The drop ceiling is almost done, and the light housings are in. There are 6, 6-inch recessed and 6, 4-inch eyeball type so I can adjust the direction of the light. I want to get bulbs that are full spectrum, color-corrected--whatever the terminology is for those bulbs that give off a more natural light. I can use PAR16 and PAR30 or R16 and R30 bulbs. The big box stores locally don't really have what I'm looking for. Has anyone dealt with an online store that they can recommend? And can you recommend a particular brand of bulb? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Peter

[Medina1128]

My suggestion would be to check at a photo supply store. My college major was in photography and there were all kinds of bulbs depending on the film you were shooting with.

[pcarrell]

In the past I've used a combination of plant "sho-n-gro" lights and some of the "natural" light bulbs that you get at wal-mart. They looked pretty good.

[Anonymous]

My suggestion would be to go to a lighting store and ask to see the flourescent bulbs that will fit in your fixtures. There are a large variety of color corrected flourescent bulbs that will fit in a standard light socket. I'm not sure if they will fit in cans...

While photo bulbs might work they are very expensive, run hot and have a short life. The question of color correction is a huge subject and there are lots of takes on it. There are fourescent bulbs out there that will come close to the color temperature of sunlight. Whether you want this on your railroad is the subject of some debate. There are lots of modelers using incandescent or halogens and reporting good results. I think the more important consideration is that one colors scenery and paints models to match the lighting you choose. Almost every light source has some skewing of the spectrum and this is ok as long as one takes this into account when coloring the layout.

What follows is a long explanation I copied from the Atlas site from a guy who worked in a flourescent light plant. I hope he doesn't mind me reposting it here. While he is talking mainly about flourescent lights, the principles apply to all lighting situations:

Your next big choice is color. Many people don't understand that lamps come in various colors. A standard shop lamp is a "Cool White" a lamp used in a kitchen is a "Warm White" and offices usually get "Daylight" colors. Lamps are judged on color temperature rated in degrees of Kelvin. The lower a color temp, the redder or "warmer" the color, the higher the temperature, the bluer or "cooler" the lamp appears. Meat counters will always use warm white lamps because they give off redder light and makes all that 3 day old meat look good.
Brightness or light output is measured in "Lumens" and cooler lamps generally output more lumens than warmer lamps meaning a layout lit by warm whites would require more fixtures to get you up to the same "brightness" level as fewer fixtures lamped with cool white tubes. There is now a law that governs what the min lumen per watt output for a lamp is but that is beyond our need for understanding here. It caused many 40 watt tubes to be discontinued and that's all you need in your pocket.
Next is a rating called CRI or color rendering index. This is a rating that judges a lamps ability to reproduce color. The standard is basically equal to color samples viewed under mid-day sunlight outdoors during mid-summer. The closer a lamp gets to making a color sample "look" the same as it "looks" under sunlight, the higher the CRI number. (The samples are 'read" by a spectralradiometer that measures reflected color wavelengths so there is a science behind it)Warm Whites are in the 30-40 range, Cool Whites are generally rated about 40-50 and Daylight lamps get up to the 50-70 range. In our case, the higher the better. Now your standard 100 watt light bulb is in the 25-30 range and down around 27K in color temperature, do your really want to model in these conditions? This is why color matching is so hard and you hear so many people giving Atlas and other manufacturers grief over the colors used. I'm sure Atlas approves color under high CRI lights and Joe Customer takes one look under his 60 watt light bulb in his workshop and has an issue right off the bat. How many prototype locos were ever seen in someone's basement? They are all viewed outdoors under nice bright sunlight............
That's a quick science lesson. What do you want? When I built my layout, I had the advantage of being able to mix my own phosphor coating and custom design my lamps at the big Sylvania plant in Kentucky. I made 32 watt "Supersaver" lamps for energy savings. (These use Krypton gas as a fill vs Argon gas used in a standard 40 watt tube). I turned our $200,000 spectrascan equipment at blue sky in October and read a color temperature of about 67K so my lamps are blended to get 67K output (Off the shelf Daylights are rated at about 55K) And then I went to work getting the CRI up to 95 by using all the best Japan-supplied phosphors. My layout uses 48 lamps so I made up a batch of 400, ran them all through photometric test to ensure they were all the same and now have enough to last me through old age. BTW, I did this all on my own time on weekends and paid for the lamps through our company store so I could get them out the door.
Most people walk into my layout room and say "***!". It's the brightest basement they've ever been in. That's what I did, what can you do???
1) Use low wattage tubes in two lamp fixtures.
2) Make a ring of light around your layout.
3) Check your electrical load and add circuits as needed.
(My lamps run on two isolated breakers--they service no outlets)
4) Invest in several sets of two tubes of different colors. Start by buying two daylight tubes and look at how they reproduce color in your train room. Buy two cool whites and compare. Buy two Warm Whites and compare. (You can get these for less than $2.00 each so make the investment.) Next, bring in a table lamp with a 100 watt bulb and take a look. Make sure there are no other light sources on when you run your little test. The CWs will make your trains look like &^%%^ you can bank on it.
5) Check at Lowes or go to Sylvania's web site and get pricing on lamps called D865 or D965 Designer Series. You'll pay more but they will give you the best representation of sunlight money can buy on our model RR budgets. They are mot cheap but these are what big department stores use and its the reason all those Polo shirts look so darn tempting. It's also why they don't look so good when you get home and look in the mirror. The D865 will get you 65K lamps with a CRI of 82-85 and the D965s will get you 65K lamps with a CRI of 88 to 91. The best you can get. GE offers similar lamps, just make sure you check the ratings.
Lastly, is the old fading issue. UV fades color without a doubt. You can buy UVA and UVB specialty lamps and either tan your butt or fade and age models. Regular lamps use a blend of glass that filters out most of the UV but some does escape and will add to fading of certain paint pigments over time. You have two choices.
1) Buy UV filter covers that slide over the tubes to filter any remaining UV--hard to find but they are out there.
2) Go to an automotive store or Lowes and but UV filter film. This is a clear film applied to windows to filter out the sun's UV and it works great in the basement too. Just use it on the inside surface of those diffuser panels I told you to use and the problem is solved. One roll will do all of your basement panels and goes on with a water spray bottle and a sponge.
No UV, no fade, bright layout room and a close representation of sunlight. What could be better?

My view on CFLs is that they are great. They have come a very long way over the past few years. They are a perfect sub for incandescents for people who already have the screw-in sockets in place and can drop your current use drastically. A standard 15 amp circuit will support twenty 75 watt incandescents or 75 20-watt CFLs. That's alot of light output! If you do wi***o go the route of CFLs, I highly recommend using the screw-in type vs the ones that mount in a reflector-type fixture. The screw-ins operate on an electronic ballast that ups the operating frequency to eliminate the flicker and supports end-of-life protection.
The first CFLs on the market used a standard magnetic ballast and had a nasty habit of burning up in a violent manner when they decided they had burned long enough. All fluorescent lamps have emissive material bonded to their tungsten filaments. When heated (you apply current) the filaments get hot, and the emissive coating emits electrons that form a plasma arc inside the tube. These electrons hit mercury atoms and cause them to emit UV radiation. The phospor coating absorbs the UV and in turn emits visible light. When a 4-foot lamps runs out of the emitter while operating, the arc attaches to the coil and burns it up making the end of the lamp black. Normally the lamp will flicker and die with no ill effects. CFL are much different since the tube diameter is much smaller. The plasma arc is compressed and runs with a higher power density and much higher operating temperature (thus the higher effeciency). If you doubt this, try touching one that's been on for a few minutes, you'll never do it again. Trouble is, the power density is so high that when the emissive material is used up, the arc attached to the coil, burns it up and then moves to the wire that passes through the glass and proceeds to melt it. Basically the arc runs away and is out of control, something we call half wave rectification. What happens is the arc will follow the wire down into the glass seal and burn a hole through. You would either get a loud "POP", melt down your socket or the tubes would shatter and drop out of their fixtures onto things below. UL finally mandated the use of fusable links in the ballast that would blow when the current shot sky high as the lamps were dieing. The electronic ballast has end-of-life protection built into it in the form of a current limiting circuit that has proven to be pretty failsafe. I pulled all the old magnet ballast styles out of my house years ago but now have some of the new electronic style lamps in my home office and love 'em.
As for TCP, I would bet these lamps are manufactured by Philips and sold to TCP for resale. The equipment to make these is very expensive, especially the twisted type and few startup companies have the millions of dollars to invest in this type of production line. (I think we had something like $15 million invested in one our first Compact lines) Philips has been doing the twisted style for years and may actually hold a patent on it if memory serves.

The color of lamp you use is totally personal choice. I noticed these 27K versions have a CRI of 82 which is darn good for a lamp that "warm". You can bet these have massive amounts of green phosphor mixed in to get the rating up in the 80's. You can't see it with your eye but the frequency of green light is weighted heavy in the CRI calculations and that is a quick fix to meet a rating. Trouble is, the green light is there contributing and reacting with the pigment in your subjects so be careful of low (K rating) temperature lamps boasting a high CRI. Certain colors can start to look odd.
Again, I recommend buying one of each color and viewing your favorite models in a darkened room with the lamp as the only illumination source. Face it, its a lot cheaper to buy four different colors and chuck the three you don't like vs buying 45 and then deciding your Rock Island Blue looks more like BN green. Use the ones you don't like in a table lamp in the bedroom or out in the garage. Personally I like the higher K rated lamps. My reasons for going with the 67K custom blend is that October in Appalachia is my favorite time of year to railfan and I feel I get my best shots under clear blue Fall skies with all the vivid tree colors in the background. I actually waited months to use our equipment to read the October sky and had cheap cool whites in the layout room while building benchwork. IMHO, my efforts were worth it for me, one flick of the switch after installing the 67Ks and I knew I had not wasted my time. Now if you model western roads where the hot summer sun brings out the redder colors of the soils, lower K lamps may make you happy.
Hope this helped somewhat..............
Robby Vaughntop
v

[pcarrell]

Yeah, what he said... [;)]

[jhugart]

usalights.com is a nice site I've used for the track lighting I put in my basement. You can pretty much get what you want there.

[TBat55]

I use the flourescent bulbs from Walmart that come in an all orange sleeve. They are "full spectrum", like natural light, and 40W. Noticeably better to me.

[roadrat]

If you decide to buy the "sho-n-grow" lights and then start spending alot of time in your basement, don't be suprised to find a "Acme cable co." van parked across the street from your house all day and all night[:O][;)][:-^][:D]


bill

[pcarrell]

I used them because they are reletivly cheap and when combined one on one with a regular floresent bulb I found it gave off a little better light then the stark white of just the regular bulbs.

Just don't buy 20 of them at once or you will have the aforementioned van in your neighorhood!

[Anonymous]

In case anyone is still reading this topic, I did a large fluorescent lighting test on my layout. Here are the results:
http://www.irritatedvowel.com/Railroad/Layout/Lighting/CompareFluorescents.aspx

http://www.irritatedvowel.com/Railroad/Layout/Lighting/CompareHalogen.aspx

My main lighting page:
http://www.irritatedvowel.com/Railroad/Layout/Lighting/Lighting.aspx

Note that the ballasts are as important as the lamps. The Workhorse ballasts I use are just about the best. There is no hum, no interference (DCC or otherwise), and they get the most out of your lamps. I have them in my layout, in my work room, and now in my woodworking workshop. I have spoken with other folks who tried the regular electronic ballasts and were disappointed. When they finally gave in and tried these, the difference was incredible.

Pete
http://www.irritatedVowel.com

[Anonymous]

BTW, those lamps at WalMart, if they are what I have seen, are "Daylight" not "Full Spectrum". There is actually a huge difference with Daylight being only marginally better than normal lamps, but also less expensive than most full spectrum lamps.

I use the Excella 40W T12 lamps from www.1000bulbs.com . They work very well.

Pete
http://www.irritatedVowel.com