12v ES LED Bulbs and Garden Lights

LucianH

I'm working on a low voltage lighting installation for our garden and would welcome some advice. Specifically, we're looking for lights to light up a patio area. It's an area of about 6m square and we're thinking of using 4 wall lights (two each along two sides of the patio) and a couple of post lights along another side.

I've come across two suppliers - Techma and Lumena.

One thing that concerns me is how bright some of the lights will be. For example, the Techmar products all seem to be low wattage LEDs (between 1 and 2 watts). From what I can gather, these are only equivalent to less than 15W conventional bulbs.

Within the Lumina product range, however, they do ES/E27 fitting 12V AC or DC bulbs up to 7W which should give out light equivalent to 50W conventional bulb.

So I have two specific queries:

1) Have I got my "brightness" equivalent calculations above correct? And if anybody has got Techma 1 or 2 watt lights, are you happy with the brightness?

2) The Lumina ES/E27 12 LED's look a very attractive proposition which will enable us to use conventional garden lights fitted with ES sockets. However, these do seem to be quite a specialist product and it would concern me that we're choosing a solution that appears to be almost single source and may be a short term niche product. Does anybody know of similar higher wattage 12v ES/E27 bulbs from other well known brands?

Thanks

LucianH

I posted this some time ago and I apologise for bumping it but I didn't have any replies.

Our planned landscaping works were delayed but are now soon to start and I really hope that someone can help out with advice and recommendations on 12v lighting as details in the original post.

TheCyclingProgrammer

Im just about to buy a set of Technar post and spike lights so will report back.

Jonesya

One suggestion, could you use a fitting that takes standard 12v halogen lamps and then fit LEDs? So using a standard 12v lamp, rather than an unusual 12v E27 lamp?

For example MR16 spots- there's loads of LED MR16 lamps available up to 7w or more and they're quite cheap.

Or G4 12v LEDs, these tend to be less powerful at a few watts each so would need a fitting with multiple lamps or more fittings, but again they're a very common fitting so readily available and cheap.

The fittings might come with power supplies so you'd need to remove these and wire directly to lamp holder, with a local 12v fuse.

Edit - one further option is to use a converter, they're readily available on EBay, to fit a 12v type bulb into an E27 fitting. Either a regular lighting bulb like a G4 or something like an standard automotive 12v bulb. You do need to think about the safety issues in case a family member were to ever fit this into a 240v e27 fitting, but the same probably applies to the 12v e27 lamps.