On 06/06/10 10:04 PM, terry wrote:

snip

As posted here previously, mains voltage neons use a milliamp or two,
at 120 or 240 volts, LEDs probably less!

Indicator LEDs are about 2mA at 2VDV, so at 120VAC the losses in the
transformer and rectifiers are far more than the power actually drawn by
the LED. A neon lamp might actually be more efficient to run off of AC
since you don't have all the losses of the magnetics. You could run an
LED off low voltage AC and it would just illuminate on half of each
cycle (some cyclists do this when they connect an LED directly to their
dynamo without using a rectifier).