Elemental LED Customer Service Representative Tara shared her LED night light project for July’s DIY Employee Projects, and explained how she used High Density LED Strip Light, a connector and a couple of low voltage batteries to transform a wine bottle into a night light. She said: “I thought it would be cool to illuminate a piece of recycled material, so I decided to take an empty wine bottle to transform it into an artistic night lamp for my room.
“First, I took a wine bottle and soaked it in warm water allowing most of the original label to peel off and scraped any residue that was left behind. I went a step further and applied rubbing alcohol to the bottle to make a clean and sticky free surface and let dry for a few minutes.
“Then I took some cool decal stickers and made a nice motif around the perimeter of the bottle making sure all corners of the stickers were secure to the bottle. Taking the bottle outside on some newspaper I sprayed the bottle with a solid spray paint, two coatings to be sure the bottle had proper dispersal. I allowed the paint to dry a couple of hours before removing the stickers with a pair of tweezers.
“After the stickers had been removed, I proceeded to fill in the negative space left behind by the stickers and painted it a shear white with a yellow trim and also painted around the decal images with a darker purple paint to ensure no extra light was escaping. I left a ring of negative image around the top of the bottle, without painting over it with the white paint to give it more dimension and interest.
“Hollowing out the cork, I was able to feed a 2 foot Flexible LED Strip Light Splice Connector attached to 2 feet of the High Density LED Strip Light into the bottle, and soldering on a connection to two low voltage batteries, each with a lifespan of 7 hours. This project was for design purposes only. To use this as a night light, I would have powered the lights with a 12V Adapter, but it would interfere with the look of my design, since there would be wires sticking out of the cork.”
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Of course it would be better to come up with LEDs in the bottle on the driver. And the practical and uncomplicated
For your next project you could grind a hole in the bottom of the glass to use a plug in cord. Super easy!
Hi Bob, thanks for your question. The batteries Tara used were 23A 12V Super Akaline. I hope that clarifies things a bit.
Neat idea; great description of the art work. May be obvious, but “low voltage batteries” is vague (probably not AAA!): lithium button cells? Some specifics would help some of us.