It’s still raining. This autumn is setting new records in sogginess. Luckily, there is something we can do inside Steve, under his beautifully leak-free roof. The LED lights have arrived and can be fitted today.
We look up to see where to best attach the fittings. Ah. Steve’s roof is now a traditional corrugated metal roof but his ceiling is still… unorthodox. We go scurrying around the site looking for planks of wood that would work as lighting mounts. There’s a debate about how wet a piece of wood can be before it’s unusable as a thing to screw electrics onto.
The Mentors are getting impatient: “C’mon. They’re not that wet and they’ll have time to dry before there’s actually any electricity going in. The battery’s not connected yet. Let’s just get on with it.”
We’ve chosen LEDs for the same reason that household lighting began moving towards LEDs a decade or two ago: compared with the most common alternative (tungsten filament) LED saves a LOT of energy, more even than the other energy efficient alternative, fluorescent tube. This is because while a tungsten lightbulb loses 90% of the power it consumes as heat, the equivalent loss for a light fitting like ours is 30% (all component parts included).
A similarly efficient solution would be fluorescent tubes; however, LEDs need replacing much less frequently (by factor of four or thereabouts) and in addition to longevity, they also score highly on safety. LEDs don’t break easily and if they do, they present no toxic hazards. Fluorescent tubes, on the other hand, break more easily and can release mercury.
After some wonderful lessons in power tool use and some departures from various comfort zones (a circular saw to cut through a single 10 cm wide plank, is that really necessary?) the lights are up but not on. Oh please can we have some rain-free Mondays now?
