TaoTronics LED Floor Lamp indicator light circuit bend

I bought a TaoTronics LED Floor Lamp from Amazon which has three different color modes (half the LED’s are warm white, the other half are cool white, and you can pick either or both banks together) and allows you to dim the light (which might be needed, as it’s quite bright at full power). Because it uses LEDs, it only draws 10-12 watts for a lot of light output, and you can convert it to a desk lamp just by unscrewing the two extension tubes. Overall I’ve been very happy with it.

The only complaint I had was that the standby indicator light that lights up the power switch to make it easy to find at night was white instead of red, and slightly brighter than I liked. (Most people wouldn’t mind at all, I’m especially sensitive to light at night…)

So I opened the control panel of the lamp by unscrewing four screws in the back and pulling the front piece off. There is a steel C channel that goes from the purple tube screw at the bottom to the gooseneck at the top which I had to take out (3 screws at the top and bottom) to get access to the circuit board.

I got lucky in that the LED is mounted on the back of the circuit board and shines through a hole to the button on the front so I could easily remove it. (The circuit board was glued in, so I wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it.) The LED is the surface mount component with the green triangle on it.

Even if you don’t have a soldering iron, you could just rip this LED out with a pair of needle nose pliers to disable the light completely. (The lamp works perfectly fine without this indicator LED in place.)

I happened to have a small 2.5mm dim red led in my parts box, so I bent the legs around and soldered it in place.

Because the new LED is a bit taller than the old surface mount LED, I insulated the back of the LED and the steel C channel with black electrical tape to make sure it wouldn’t short out inadvertently when I re-assembled the control panel.