LED's vs. regular bulbs I was thinking

So I got my no load flasher relay and most of my LED bulbs. Plan to swap out my brake and turn signal bulbs tomorrow. I'll do the instrument and idiot lights when those bulbs arrive.

I'd like to take some measurements to see how much I reduce the overall load on my electrical system.

Time to help a noob. What exactly should I measure?

Ok I went ahead and replaced the incandescent bulbs in my turn signals and tail light.

I had a Ebay gift card so I decided to try some 24 led bulbs I found there. I tried some amber and white lights. Here are the results.

Here's an incandescant turn signal before replacement:



Here's the leds amber on left, white on right



Here's the view from behind with the leds

The leds distribute the light more than it appears in the photos. The photos make them look like there's a bright white center without much light around the lens. There is a little of that effect to the naked eye, but it's not nearly as pronounced as in the photos.

My biggest complaint about these bulbs is that while they are plenty bright, there's not enough difference in the intensity between the dim and bright state of the dual intensity bulbs.

On the rear turn signals this doesn't matter because they're single intensity (no running lights) on the front turn signals it's a little bit of an issue, but not major. Where I'm really not happy is with the led in the tail light.

The lack of difference in intensity between the running light and brake light state is a hazzard. I wouldn't feel confident that even a driver who was paying attention would notice my brake light with this bulb.

Also, the led in the tail light is making my "stop" indicator/idiot light flicker.

So I swapped back the tail light to the incandescent. So that's the summary of my experience with the inexpensive led bulbs from ebay.

I guess the next thing to try would be some higher quality bulbs from superbrightleds.

Anybody know if there's a spec that indicates the difference in intensity between the dim and bright state for led bulbs?

BTW, I did use the CF-12AN-L flasher recommended by others in this thread and it does fit my 79 750 twin just fine. Turns out you can put a square peg in a round hole after all.

The LEDs where they are made up of a lot of single LEDs are generally poor in performance. I also tried them before chucking them and going for the 3W Luxeon type. They have a better dispersion angle and are much brighter even in direct sunlight. Also have a very strong difference between Low/High on the dual power bulbs.

Topper wrote:
Anybody know if there's a spec that indicates the difference in intensity between the dim and bright state for led bulbs?

The ones at superbright do have intensity specs but I am not expert enough to know just by looking how bright that means they are in life. The human eye also has different response to different colors of light so that complicates things as well.

The dispersion angle is very important since a very bright "point source" is not what you want.