Business Sign

We bought our CW back in January and one of things needing reworked was the business sign. After taking it down, I discovered the ballast was bad along with needing new panels. A new sign was not in the budget so I set out to fix the one we had. The panels wern't hard to source or finding someone to do our lettering. But replacing the ballast was an issue.

This sign holds (4) 48" flourescent bulbs at 40w each, total 160w. Don't really know how much the ballast consumes, its huge. So I decided to experiment. I did lots of research on LED lights and thought I'd try some 120v LED rope lights to light the sign. What I came up with is wrapping about 100 feet of the LEDS inside the sign. 100 feet of LED rope lights only uses 70w of power. They have 100,000 hour life expectancy. At 12 hrs a day, they should last over 22 years if my calculations are right! Plus electricity savings is more than 50% over flourescents.

Not a huge savings in electricity dollar wise. But we saved significantly compared to buying a brand new sign. Plus by using the LEDS, I won't be needing to climb a ladder every year to change bulbs. That in itself is significant.

I'll bet it lights the sign more evenly than four bulbs spaced apart. You can usually see the four separate lights in the sign.

The light is more even. Its amazing how I never paid attention to other signs untill I messed with this one. Now when I pass one, I notice you can actually see the bulbs behind the panels.

My sign is so high up, you would almost need a lift to be able to slide a panel out to change a bulb....Safely.... Now I'm hoping with "22" years of bulb life, I won't be needing that lift till the sign needs replaced!

I might add. This sign is about 30 years old. With new panels, paint, and aluminum carpet trim, this sign looks good as new. Saved me a bunch of $$$.


Jeff

Great job, and really innovative. I always hated how the sign co. on one of my signs had like 5 foot bulbs, only could find them at a sign co. for $18 a bulb.
They would have charged you as much as buying a new sign, for a rebuild.

Nice Job

Nice job done. Sign looks work of professional company

2Biz,

Great idea. We had a project over 8 years ago where we wanted to have Open & Close signs go on via time set. We actually used scrap aluminum angle & we were given a huge old sign that most of its individual light emitting diodes were working. It was more labor intensive than I prefer but we used those used leds & most of the leds still function. I used a diode tester to verify whether they were OK. None of the material cost us anything so that helped. Some knowledge of making sure each led gets the same voltage which so the series wiring has to be calculated properly.

The nice thing about that approach we change just the pattern of leds being energized which makes it so the same sign can be used for both the open & close message.

MJ

How are LED's in the cold weather? Do they need to warm up? Any other weather issues with them?

LEDs have no "warm-up" at all and no minimum temperature for operation.

MJ...

Its neat what you can do when you put your mind to it! Sounds like a cool project you did with your sign. So far my sign is working flawlessly...I couldn't imagine what it would have cost for a new sign, plus what it would cost to operate. I just know that with the little effort I put into this, the savings was huge...

Cool...where did you get the led rope lights?

I got the lights from 1000bulbs.com...Here is the p/n and description:

SIV-LEDSWW: LED - Warm White - Rope Light Spool - 1/2 in. - 2 Wire - 120 Volt - 148 ft. Spool - FlexTec IFL-15A

The ones I got were warm white. The amount of light output might have been a bit better if I would have gotten a brighter white bulb. I'm not at all unhappy about the way it turned out, just maybe could have done a tad better with a different bulb...If its even available in the rope lighting?