RV Lighting

When we first bought our RV, I immediately switched out all the overhead recessed lighting with warmer 2700k lights, as the stock 5000k lights produced too harsh a white light for my eyes. Then I did the following; 

These are modifications that I made to my RV in the Spring of 2022 to prepare our then new 5th wheel for stargazing dark sites. I purchased multi-color LED strips from Amazon, and bought a connector kit to connect the strips. These are controlled by remote, and go very, very, very low in brightness. These are usable for astronomy, unlike other LEDs which tend to be very bright. Too bright that it ruins night adapted eye sight. 

All strips are wired into 12v light fixtures, so they can run off the battery should the RV be off-grid when boondocking. The LED lights are not quite bright enough to provide lots of ambient light for conversations that take place in ASL, unless the white color setting is used. But that's not important to me. More important to me is the ability of the LED lights to get dim enough in the red color so that night vision is preserved. 

These pictures were taken with the LEDS at max brightness. The pictures showing the interior are noisy because of the low light- I can only do so much with a cell phone.

2 years later.... 

The red LEDs on the inside of the the slide-out lips are excellent for observing- they go very dim. The problem was, at their brightest and in other colors like white, blue, green, etc etc, it was not near enough to illuminate the RV so that my wife and I could communicate in ASL without the overhead lights which are harsh and not very good quality lights. 

So we bought 150' of  CCT LEDS, which have two separate chips for white light. One chip for warm white, and another chip for cool white light. Then, there are three more chips, for red, blue, and green to make the colors. These are the best LED strips hands down, and they were expensive too. About $30 for each 16 feet. To retrofit the RV, we removed all the molding and ran aluminum channels all along the perimeter of the interior, the bunkhouse, and the sofa slide out. The result is amazing- literally night and day.

The aluminum channels were mounted with 3M VHB tape. I cannot recommend this stuff enough for these types of purposes. It's strong stuff, and anything mounted with it will stay where it is!

2020 Lighting Change

2022 Lighting Update with LED behind slideouts

2023 Lighting Update with CTT throughout RV