I know this has been mentioned before but I think it is worth pointing out again now that the holidays are here and for the new folks as cheap and easy method for lighting.
I have a string in purple, which got by mistake, and a string of warm white… I used the purple in the penthouse of the Walthers Ashmore Hotel because I am setting up a party scene. Not too bright, not too dark… just right for the party look . As I build other rooms in the hotel I will use the white light for those.
Wall-mart has a spool of 180 LEDs for 22.50. The ones with the plactic do-dads on top have the smaller T-1 lamp inside. Watch to see if you are getting warm white or cool white. The larger T-1 3/4 sises are also available. Some of these have an inverted cone tip that spreads the light out rather than concentrating it in a spot.
My wife just picked up some small LED battery operated lights today. I have a Christmas Train Bridge that had regular lights under it, but they got broke during storage, so my wife is replacing them with the smaller ones. She paid $3.99 cents at Walmart
I am impressed at how small they are and I think they would look cool inside a building.
I’m going to use the batteries for now, but will be modifying it to use a 4.5 volt power supply available everywhere that carries Christmas Village stuff.
You could use the batteries to power the LEDs but you have other options.
Most modelers will not use the lights in the original string format. Instead they will harvest the individual LEDs and wire a resistor to each LED so they can be run from a 12 volt power supply. The resistor size is somewhat flexible but in most cases a 1000 ohm resistor will work fine. The number of LEDs that you can run from your power supply is dependant on the wattage of the supply. LEDs usually draw between 20 ma and 30 ma. The math is fairly simple - if you have 10 LEDs drawing 30 ma you need a power supply that will safely provide 300 ma. By safely, I mean that you must have some extra capacity in your power supply to keep things from overheating, so if your draw is 300 ma, your power supply should be somewhere in the 450 - 500 ma range.
Christmas decorations are not the only cheap source for LEDs. There are lots of deals on eBay. I have purchased 100 warm white LEDs for less than $5.00, sometimes even with free shipping! If you need cheap resistors then go to Digikey. You can get 200 resistors for just a couple of dollars and their shipping is exceptional - next day to Canada for $8.00.
Batteries are probably the most expensive way to power LEDs. If one is using them for structure lighting they could just leave them strung together and use the normal 110V. But in my opinion the normal way is to take the LEDs out of the strings. Hook them up to the normal accessory power or a wal-wart or use them in locos, passenger cars, and cabooses from track power.
