Building lights

[morairamike]

Over the last couple of weeks I've been fitting LED lights inside my buildings. The usual power source for these lights is battery and they come in 50 or 100 and are all in parrallel miniature lights as sold by Wilko for table decoration and are usually on thin wire that is insulated by being dipped in varnish or similar. These you  can cut into any length string you want. Clean off the varnish and connect to power.  By chance my friend had a set of lights for her garden that packed up and I repaired. These were solar powered and had a 1.2 AA rechargeable battery  in a solar cell unit. The unit has a small control PCB inside. Now I got to thinking LED are 3v or there abouts so how does the 1.2 battery power them. Investigation showed that the solar cell puts out about 1.99 to 2.1 v to recharge the battery and when that drops to around zero the PCB, then uses the battery voltage to power a converter that in my friends units case produces 3.8v A.C.  Yes A.C. and that drives the LEDs. I bought another set from WILKO and that is 50 bulbs but has 3 AA normal  so 4.5 volts. In this case the PCB produces 3 volts but it's D.C. this time.

I had already committed to using Buck Boost voltage regulators but thought you could use the solar units for outside lights to drive lights on the layout and they'd come on automatically as it got dark.  I have to say I was surprised to find that some are A.C. some are D C.

[Jimbo1707820979]

Very ingenious, Mike but perhaps a bit complicated for someof us less expert than yourself.  Myself, I use wall-worts producing 12v with switches or remote controls, plugging into the mains. I can then turn on a bunch of inter-connected building lights with one or two buttons. The lights are mainly LED strips with resistor fitted.   I also have some street lamps, with resistors, connected to a 9-volt battery via a locking reed switch but the disadvantage of this is having to renew the battery, esp. if in an awkward place.

[GWR LNER fan 4472]

I've only recently added some lights to our layout. I'm using a set of battery-operated Christmas lights, the sort that you'd find on a table decoration, similar to morairamike's, only they're in series, not parallel. They're not incredibly bright, but the batteries have been in there a while. Fortunately, the buildings on our layout are in a town square setting, so the cable just sits on the baseboard with the buildings on top of it. It does mean that all of them are lit up at the same time, but that doesn't bother me at the moment. May get bits of black card to block out the odd window at a later date.

 

The battery pack is hidden in a Superquik fire station, so when I want to turn the lights on, I simiply reach in and flick the switch.

 

Of course, I'm not using it at the moment, not just because it's getting dark later, but also because I haven't been able to get to the layout with the current lockdown :-(