We purchased a bunch of lights for the cabin last spring, but then we got busy, and of course the days got longer and sunnier, so who needed lights anyways?
Well, here we are now at the beginning of November, and it’s getting dark by suppertime. So the cabin needed to get the lights installed. Ken has been busy wiring the place up. We are using energy efficient 12 V lighting – a combination of ceiling lights and adjustable work station lamps. The ceiling lights are RV led lighting fixtures that use very little power to provide bright light. Ken converted several of our old desk lamps to 12 volts. In these, we are using diffused led bulbs (just screw in like regular light bulbs).
Light is a great thing! I can now cook supper without using my headlamp, and work on the computer in the evening without a flashlight. The things we take for granted sometimes!
We use 12-volt lights run off battery packs mainly in the winter. We have two bulbs (one each) behind our corners of the sofa. Our solar system converts to A/C so it an energy hog this time of year with little sun to recharge our batteries. We also have propane lights in key locations that come into play in the winter. They are efficient for general lighting, but not the best for reading, etc. I agree, lights in winter are a very good thing. – Margy
Interesting that your solar systems converts to A/C. Ours is direct DC through a charge controller to our battery pack (4 6V golf cart batteries at the moment, although we may get something else in the future). On a sunny day, the solar panels can have the batteries up to full charge in a couple of hours. During the last spell of rainy weather, we were running a small genset every couple of days to keep the charge up.
We use kerosene lanterns as a lighting backup (and last winter when we had no lights wired in). They probably rate along with propane lanterns as definitely not the reading lights of choice!