Powering a hardwae clamp light w/ compact fluorescent light bulb with D batteries...

Artman009

Artman009

Active member
So I am shooting a short film in the next few months and I'm planning on trying to do some experimental lighting. The goal is to see how cheap and portable I can assemble a lighting kit. I'm thinking of having only a few simple clamp lights with compact fluorescent light bulbs in them and running them off of a set of D batteries.

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My question is this--anybody got a suggestion how I'd do that?

Thanks.
 
Mods will move it for you. Running flourescents off of batteries is going to be tricky. You'll need to step up the 1.5v to 110 somehow... I'd skip flo's and go for LED's if you are needing to go off of battery power.
 
You could use an off the shelf inverter (Radio Shack, $30 to $60) and run it off 8 D cells in series (12V). You could run, say, 4 23W CFLs for about 1-1/2 hours using Alkaline D Cells.
 
Oh I didnt think you could make that much wattage with D-cells. Good to know Dan. Still alot of batteries and weight with the inverter.
 
Your not going to get that kind of power from 8 D cels. You will need an inverter though since the CF's need AC. And this is a very waste heavy set up. The inverter will suck some juce just to function and then the ballast in the CF is going to suck up some, and you end up with dim ugly light. I would go get some bulk LED's and solder up a panel of them. You will get better brighter light and much better battery life and that means it will end up costing you less. Or get one of those portable car batteries and use 12V DC bulbs. Headlights would work but there probably a bit spotty so your either going to have to find some narrow floods or bounce them off a reflector.
 
Noiz2 said:
Your not going to get that kind of power from 8 D cels. You will need an inverter though since the CF's need AC. And this is a very waste heavy set up. The inverter will suck some juce just to function and then the ballast in the CF is going to suck up some, and you end up with dim ugly light. I would go get some bulk LED's and solder up a panel of them. You will get better brighter light and much better battery life and that means it will end up costing you less. Or get one of those portable car batteries and use 12V DC bulbs. Headlights would work but there probably a bit spotty so your either going to have to find some narrow floods or bounce them off a reflector.
Click to expand...

Totally what I was going to say. Modern electrical light sources are powered by three different types of electricity.... DC, 60Hz AC, and high frequency AC. If you're running with batteries, you'll get the best life from a light source that uses DC. LEDs are generally more efficient than tungsten bulbs, but they are a pain to solder a ton of them to a board. You might find ok results by making a direct conversion from DC to high frequency AC. I have seen some "flashlight" style 5" fluo tubes that run for hours on 4 AA batteries.

If you want something slightly more portable and less likely to ruin your clothes, you can get a sealed gel battery (like you'll find in a UPS or some fire alarm equipment). The company I use is called Battery Component Supply (262) 338-8980.

Warning---Tech Speak---
To get an idea of the power you'll need... Watts=AmpsxVolts. At 100% efficiency, a 24w CFL would need 2 Amps from a 12 volt source. If your D-cells have 1600mAh (1600 milliAmp hours or 1.6 Amp hours), then you would have less than an hour of time (taking efficiency into account, you'd probably have closer to 12 minutes).
 
The best way to power fluorescents with batteries would be to use a separate ballast powered by DC voltage which then powers one or more tubes. The battery powered fluorescent worklights mentioned by ProfessorU work like that.

Its doubtful you will find a CFL with a DC ballast in the base and that would be certainly the most convenient way to do it. Inverters for this kind of thing really would be a waste of power and therefore a waste of time too.
 
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