How many LED can be powered off a 12V car battery?

My friends and I have recently discovered a little hangout spot in the forest that backs onto my house. We're usually out until 2am and it gets quite dark, making it very difficult to walk back. We've come to the conclusion that we can use super bright white LED's to light up a pathway and a little bit around our hangout spot. My question is how many LED's could you power using a 12V battery. I know LED' can't go in parallel because of different tolerances and whatnot, but in series I'm guessing we can power 16 in a row? Then have strings of 16 in parallel to provide more light?



There is no change of running the power off the mains electricity, it must be battery powered.



...any advise would be greatly appreciated.How many LED can be powered off a 12V car battery?You probably won't get 16 LEDs. You will probably only get like 5 or 6 maybe....maybe a bit more or less, but that's a ballpark figure, and it depends on the LEDs as well.



Where I use to work we use to also use a current-limiting resistor of 10 惟 per string of 5 LEDs. This was not met with factual reasoning however. When questioned, it was stated that it was 'historical'. So, whether they served a purpose or not I don't know. It may have been overkill, but we never, ever blew LEDs and we pulsed them at currents way, WAY over their rating. At that time it was 20 mA max, and pulsed we maintained about 600 mA.



So, that's my input.





hthHow many LED can be powered off a 12V car battery?Sounds like a good choice.



Thanks :)

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