I’m originally from the UK, but have now lived in California for about 30 years. I will mention two aspects of this Californian life. Firstly, the weather is so mild an outdoor shower is completely reasonable year-round. We all love it. Secondly, the electricity goes off with alarming frequency. You just can’t rely on it at all. Neither of these things are true in the UK.
This week I decided to add proper lighting to the outdoor shower. One thing I dislike about power outages is the feeble light from emergency lanterns. I wanted a lot of cheerful, warm light.
The bulbs themselves are these 6W warm LED filament-style bulbs. I tested them out on the bench, and found they stay lit anywhere from 7-24 V. They take a constant 18W for the whole set. The wiring is a spouse-approved 3-way pendant set.
The actual supply is in the box on the right. It’s a 3D printed enclosure with a pop-on/off lid.
In black PLA, it only took 1 hour to print. I’m getting a bit more fluent in OpenSCAD with practice. Designing the enclosure and lid took about an hour. Some of that was genuine thinking about shapes. But most of it messing around with the code. It’s a lot of fun.
Here’s the installed enclosure with the internals. Batteries, holder, and a switch.
The box uses a 4-way 18650 battery holder, so the voltage at full charge is about 16V. That’s about 2½ hours of light, so I might expect to have to recharge the pack every two weeks or so. A few years ago I discovered lever wire connectors and my life was slightly improved. Recommended.
This was my first time using 18650 Li-ion batteries. Amazon is full of 18650 batteries with utterly implausible capacity claims. These ones turned out to be the real thing. I did test them for a few cycles, and they are indeed 3300mAh. Phew! Though next time I’ll likely follow this buying advice on reddit.
Thanks for reading.