LED vs incandescent lighting... the choice is yours.
Lighting our miniatures brings them to life. What kind of lighting should you use? Obviously not the same type we use in our homes. The power used in your home is generally 110 Volts and the bulbs you use in your house are built to stand 110 volts of electricity.
So what should we use?
The typical lighting system for dollhouse miniatures is 12-Volt. To get the 110 volts from an outlet in your real life house down to 12 volts for your miniature house you will need a transformer. There are a few of those on the market today. The two most common are by:
Cir Kit Concepts Evan Designs
Each of the above will power 12 volt systems. They plug into a standard household outlet.
To get the power from the transformer to the miniature a “power carrier” is needed.
The two most commonly used are again by:
Lead in wire by Cir Kit Concepts
or
12 Volt DC Adapter Transformer by Evan Designs
The next thing to consider is the bulbs themselves. There are two choices...incandescent and LED.
Up until recently incandescent bulbs were the most widely used in dollhouse miniatures. For dollhouses the 12 volt bulbs are most frequently used, For smaller scales such as quarter scale houses and room boxes, the 16 volt bulbs are used because they burn dimmer on a 12 volt system. For the micro scale miniatures (1:144) the 1.5 volt bulbs are used with battery power.
The most recent development in miniature lighting has been the use of LED (light emitting diode) lighting. Unlike its incandescent cousin, the LED bulb does not give off heat like the incandescent bulbs do. Heat in a dollhouse is detrimental if left on for long periods of time. The LEDs can be left on without any effect because they don’t produce heat.....just light. One other major advantage of LED lighting is that the bulbs last considerably longer, so although the initial cost is a bit more, in the long run they actually cost less to use.
Besides the issue with heat using the incandescent bulbs, there is the issue of color. If you want a color other than clear, the incandescent bulbs must be painted to achieve a different color. The LEDs come in 8 different colors.
I will be posting more information here on the use of LEDs so return soon to catch up with the difference between the two systems and the different processes used for applications. I will eventually do a conversion slide presentation on converting to LED from incandescent lighting.
In the meantime, for those who are already using LED bulbs you have noticed that the wires to the bulbs are thinner and harder to strip. Incandescent bulb wires are coated with a softer plastic that can be stripped with your fingers. The LED wires are hard plastic (Kynar) so the stripping with fingers is not possible.
It is important not to get the light (diode) hot so a match is not recommended for stripping the wires.
I use a 12 volt soldering iron connected to my 12V transformer.
This short video will demonstrate how I strip the wires on the
LED bulbs so that there is about 1/4” of bare wire at the end.
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•Fold a paper towel into a long strip.
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•Heat up your solder iron, we used a 12 volt pencil style iron.
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•Cut the wires to the desired length.
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•Lay one wire on the paper towel holding the wire
between two fingers about 3/4" above the cut end.
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•Place the tip of the soldering iron 1/4" up from the end.
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•Count to two seconds.
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•pull the wire out from under the iron.
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•Wire comes clean.
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•Wipe the iron on the paper towel.
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•Do the second wire.
Be sure to come back for more information on electrifying your miniatures.
ELECTRICAL
