1W 350mA LED and 700mA Driver Compatibility

Greetings.

I have a 9W 700mA driver laying around for some future projects. Does connecting a 1 watt 350mA LED to it, burn the LED instantly because,i guess, it will take 700mA…or, hopefully, the driver adjust itself to give whatever the amount of current LED demands?

It’s often a little unclear what domestic drivers will do.
However, you say it’s 9 Watts and 700mA.
This implies it will do 4 or 5 LEDs in series, because 1 LED on 700mA is approximately 2 Watts, so 4 in series would be 8 Watts and 5 in series will do 10 Watts.
Maybe it says “4-5×2W” on a sticker on the little transformer, when it’s a mains powered driver.
Maybe it can do 1 to 4 LEDs in series.
But to answer your question, no, 700mA is twice the rated current of your 1 Watt LED.
It may survive, but it may not.
But your driver may have a hard time with only 1 LED too, and decide to die too…

Some pics of the driver would help…

You can look upon it from another perspective:
W (att) = V (olt) * A (mpere) => do some substitutions and get => V (olt) = W (att) / A (mpere).

So the driver is: 9W / 0.7A = 12.9V. And the led is: 1W / 0.35A = 2.9V.
Take the outcomes with a grain of salt, because Watt’s are almost always presented in round figures.

But I think it is safe to say that if you connect a led to a driver that delivers 4.5 times the Volts and 2 times the Amp’s the led is rated at, that led won’t last long.