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Costume lighting for 5-6 hours - advice on voltage, batteries etc!


SaraBlackburn

Hello, 

I'm looking to light some costumes for a minumum of 5 hours. I need to use portable batteries for obvious reasons but these will be charged each night. Each costume will need to run 4 larger LED bulbs, about 4m of EL wire and some fairy string lights. I am assuming that I will run most of these in parallel as they need to be independent and I may add some switches. 

I am not sure how to choose the lighting and batteries and it seems to be a bit of a minefield! I'm also quite confused There are a couple of options that I have been looking at: 

Option 1: use 12V 4V LED spotlights and some 12V fairy string lights together with a 12V battery pack like this: 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12V-DC-Battery-Pack-Rechargeable-Li-ion-Battery-Polymer-Lithium-20000mA-Charger-/142822692540

However, I'm not sure about the reliability of this (I've read a bit about batteries not being what they say) and whether it will last the 6 hours. I could then run the EL wire off a separate standard AA battery pack, or find a way to connect... although would I need resistors etc?

Option 2: find some 5V LED USB spotlights such as those advertised for camping and use a mobile phone power bank. 

Option 3: use the 12V lights together with the 5V power bank... will this work??

Any advice on bulbs, battery packs and running time (and also whether I should change series/parallel) highly appreciated!!

Thanks :)

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