LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor

   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #61  
Towmart has not posted since 2012, so while he was an Advertiser, he doesn't appear to be active any more.
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #62  
I've had Rigid Industries LED's on my MF 30E for about a year and a half now... I will never go back to the Halogen lights I had before (although you can see i still have them installed).

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I left them on because they weren't hurting anything staying there, and I wanted to leave it to show guys the difference between the lights (although the mounting locations are slightly off, they are close.

Here's the difference between my halogens and the Rigid Dually Floods (The LEDs weren't aimed at this point because I was too anxious to see the difference, but you get the point)
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   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #63  
I am a fairly new owner of a year 2000 Mahindra 2810. Got it last year and started learning how to use it. Couple of weeks ago got off work at 2 am and decided it was a good time to bush hog the power line. It had not been cut for 30 years except when power company did it however now days the fly over and spray and so it was considerably grown up. Just the 2 factory lights on the front. Make a long story short got stuck in a low spot which I did not see but then since its been so overgrown I may not have seen it at noontime. I do not have a top on the tractor, something I hope to remedy sometime this year so I will be able to fasten lights higher then. I welded a brush guard on the front so I can add lights there. While cutting I had no lights at all in front of my rear tires so I had no idea what terrain I was dealing with so I believe that may be my first area that I need to concentrate on. Pretty much I want to work on several small projects over the next year or so to bring Matilda (my wife gave the tractor that name, not me) up to par to make it safer when I am working at night.
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #64  
The most useful advice I can give you is to go with warm white colour temperature. It's much nicer on your eyes, and has far better dust penetration and depth perception. I've had night-time motorcycle races where I've had to turn off my cold white HID because I could not see through the dust or read the terrain properly.
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #65  
Oh, and understand the difference between white and bright. Many people get confused.
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #66  
I'm with Yamezz on this. The 5000K and 6500K "white" LEDs that all the makers are selling are crap for actually seeing well. Sure, they're bright, but because of their color spectrum, your actual ability to see things, resolve details and shapes, etc, is much worse than it "should" be for having that many lumens.

The LEDs in the 3000K to 4000K (generally labeled "warm white") actually give you better seeing performance for less lumens. Unfortunately, the lumens per Watt is lower for the warm white LEDs (as compared to the blue-white "normal" LEDs). Because of that, no manufacturers produce a warm white bar because they're selling to an un-informed market that only shops based on "more lumens is better".

There are some awesome 4000K, high-CRI LED emitters available these days. Someone needs to build a light bar around them and go into mass production. They'll make a killing because they'll be the only vendor offering an alternative to the blue crap that everyone else is selling.
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #67  
So not to rain on anyones parade. Sunlight is rated at 5500K. There is no correlation between being able to see better under 5500K or 3000K light. Seeing better (And what does better really mean, I am going to assume further as we are discussing headlights) is a factor of lumens when we are in the 2500 to 6000K spectrum. Beyond that or below that, our eyes are not as programmed to see and the bulbs to us look dimmer. To your dog it probably looks like daylight.

The blue crap you are referencing is higher in the spectrum (around 6500K). There is, however, some correlation in regards to blue being a harder color to see so subjectively you feel it is not as strong of a light.

Because of this, you want a bulb that has CRI factored into it. Being 5500K, with a high CRI, is going to give you a very "true" color representation (assuming that we all agree that daylight produces "True" color, which is an argument I have on a daily basis with the people I work with - What is true color and what does it really mean).

Anyway, White light is a relative term. We (The US population) has been programmed to accept the warmth (2800K) of an incandescent bulb as a standard way things should look under artificial illumination. This is all psychological, a programming you have had since you were a child. We accept 5500K as the proper look for daylight. When faced with a 5500K bulb at night, when we are "programmed" for a 2800K bulb, we find it blue and "offensive". It is not the case in an analytical world. In daylight, we would find the 5500K bulb as augmentation and not being offensive.

I don't want to appear on a high horse. I too have a great disdain for 5000K bulbs inside a house, and have spent countless dollars on LED bulbs trying to find ones that are warm and what I have grown to expect.

Oh, here is a good article on CRI.

Color Rendering Index (CRI) | Topbulb
 
   / LED & Xenon Work Lights For Your Tractor #68  
There is no correlation between being able to see better under 5500K or 3000K light.
There's a significant difference when the light sources in question are discontinuous emitters like LEDs, HIDs, or fluorescents. These light sources all (but it's especially bad with LED or HID) excessive amounts of far blue that the human eye has difficulty (really, it's impossible) bringing into focus at the same time as the other wavelengths. This results in a net loss of visual acuity. Additionally, the discontinuous spectra make color differentiation more difficult and, in some cases, impossible, which can have a significant negative effect on your ability to visually determine what something is.

The blue crap you are referencing is higher in the spectrum (around 6500K). There is, however, some correlation in regards to blue being a harder color to see so subjectively you feel it is not as strong of a light.
First of all, you can't say 6500K is higher in the spectrum. Color temperature and position of a color within the spectrum have nothing to do with each other. Color temperature is an artificial scale correlating the overall emission spectrum of a radiator to the emission spectrum of an ideal blackbody radiator. So any color temperature of emitter that's continuous would contain all "colors" of light but the relative intensities of those wavelengths would determine the color temperature.

Second, because of the fact that the color temperature scale looks at the total emission spectrum of an emitter, even yellower color temperatures can contain significant amounts of blue light. In fact, the nature of the discontinuous emitters like LED and HID leads to having a HUGE amount of blue light in a fairly narrow wavelength range "balanced" by a wider, lower amplitude hump of warmer colors. It's this strong blue spike, even in a yellower color temperature emitter rated at 5000K or below, that causes vision problems.

Even a 5000K >95CRI light source contains enough blue light in relative proportion to the other colors to potentially cause problems (in large part because we never do reach direct sunlight intensity with our automotive/agricultural lighting). This is made MUCH worse when you finally beat spec sheets out of people and find out the 5000K-6500K LEDs they're using for these light pods and bars are in the ~70 CRI range. It's abysmal.

Anyway, White light is a relative term. We (The US population) has been programmed to accept the warmth (2800K) of an incandescent bulb as a standard way things should look under artificial illumination. This is all psychological, a programming you have had since you were a child. We accept 5500K as the proper look for daylight. When faced with a 5500K bulb at night, when we are "programmed" for a 2800K bulb, we find it blue and "offensive". It is not the case in an analytical world. In daylight, we would find the 5500K bulb as augmentation and not being offensive.
It's not simply a conditioned response. In absence of a reference light source, the color temperature people consider neutral drops as illuminance drops. In other words, the dimmer the light gets (starting from bright sunlight) the yellower (lower color temperature) the light has to be for people to call it "white" even when you eliminate the other reasons that we can be tricked into thinking a light source is warmer or cooler than it really is. It points to an actual physiological mechanism in our visual system that causes color perception to vary with intensity.
 
 
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