Replacing interior lights with LED's

In an effort to maximize the battery life for our annual week-long boon docking trip,  I recently ordered some LED's to replace the interior lights. We finally had a weekend to go camping, so this project was at the top of the list. Since I already had the multimeter out, I decided the check the current draw of the regular bulbs vs. the LED replacements. Wow-- what I found was really surprising.

***The fine print: These LED replacements are about 1/2 as bright the standard bulbs. They are adequate for eating or playing a game, but it might be difficult to read something with, uh, fine print. I just went back to the website (superbrightleds.com) and ordered some larger LED arrays that will generate more light. I'll report back when I have a chance to test these.

I turned on one of the double overhead lights (RP177) and found it used 2.460A. I replaced the bulbs with the LED's and remeasured the current at 0.040A. Thats less than 2% of what the std bulb used. Thats huge!

So let me put this into a battery life perspective. If you have a 75Ah (Amp*hour) RV battery, you could estimate that it would sustain a load of 1 Amp for 75 hours (under ideal conditions, battery capacity is effected by load, other factors effect capacity, your mileage may vary, blah, blah, legalese). Using the numbers from above:

std bulb:      75A*h/2.460A => 30.5 hours of use
LED array:    75A*h/0.040A => 1875 hours of use

Thats a BIG difference.

A great way to shed some load, thanks for the info.

how about some links to the bulbs that you have as replacements or the LED arrays that will generate enough light for reading.  

 The bulbs that come with the R-Pod are a 921 type. I replaced mine with Leds from Superbrightleds.com used the WLED-WHP10-D. Where there 2 921 type bulbs; I used 1 Wled-whp10-D Led. I tried the 6 led one but was not bright enough.

Correct, the interior lights are 921. These are also called miniature wedge base bulbs:

http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/index.cgi?action=DispPage&Page2Disp=%2Fmini-wedge.html

One of the claims on the above page is:

"The following 194/168 type bulbs will replace any miniature wedge base bulb with a 3 digit part number."

This, to me, means that 921's can be replaced by 194 & 168. We'll find out, since I just ordered some WLED-xHP10-DAC to go over the kitchen sink.