Worklight comparison: 400W LED vs 500Wx2 Halogen

Yeah, according to the specs leaftye posted above, the 400w LED light is rated for 44,000 lumens, or 11,000 per emitter. But, that remains to be seen. We don’t know the quality of the light, the drivers, or the emitters in particular. It isn’t hard to believe it blows away the 2x 500w halogen, though.

Pretty sure the halogens' light quality (CRI) blows away those crappy leds.

20AWG thin wire? So what? You're transmitting AC mains, so no need for high currents, so no meaningful losses at that power rating. Wanna me do the math?

Wanna do a nice mod? Get some Yuji high CRI leds.

Cheers ^:)

I don’t believe that rating for a second. It’s exaggerated even by chinese standards. The chinese 100W warm white LED’s are only rated for about 9000 lumens, so I don’t know where they’re getting another 2000 lumens from. The 100W led driver is fully enclosed like the waterproof led drivers you can find on ebay. It might even be this driver. The problem is that these drivers usually only seem to draw about half their rated current, so that’s going to drop output further. It didn’t blow away the halogen light in terms of perceived output, but it blows it away in terms of heat and should do it for power consumption too. I’m waiting on a line splitter to test total output, and if I thought about it earlier, I could have use my clamp ammeter to check when I had the back open. I don’t plan on opening the back again until I’m ready to replace the power cord. 20awg may be good enough if it’s only using 200 watts, but if for no other reason, I want it to have a thicker cord to match the plug I installed.

There are definitely other 100w LED’s with greater output and better CRI, but I believe those are $30. So that’s already $120. I think quality drivers cost about the same. I’m not doing all that. Mods will be limited to thicker wiring, trying to mod the driver, and maybe even running two drivers in parallel for each emitter if those things are as bad as some have found.

As far as quality, I doubt it’s waterproof if only because the port for the power cord was sloppily sealed with hot glue. The bezel and rear cover had a thick continuous strip of something that looked like silicone though. The paint isn’t great either.

If you guys get one, look up the color codes for EU wiring standards.

Standard practice to quote the maximum LED rating and then install it in a circuit that runs at much lower power. Hard to say how much lower, but I wouldn’t be surprised at a half or even a quarter of what they claim. If it actually was drawing 400W, even allowing for the fact that the post is four years old, it would literally be a night and day difference to the halogens.

20 gauge wire is a safety risk in this situation regardless of the current being passed. This seems to be increasingly common on low power lights rated for small low energy bulbs like 14W or maybe 20W, but quite surprising to see it on a (supposed) 400W worklight.

Why is 20ga wire a safety hazard? If it’s like the lights I had, the cable is heavy duty rated, and 20ga should be plenty for ~3.33A @120V to make 400 watts! I don’t see a problem.

I don’t have any issue believing they are running those emitters at or near the rated 100W each, but I’ve been wrong before. What I have trouble believing is the claim of over 100 lm/w from cheap Chinese COB emitters. I’d be more likely to believe ~60 lm/w efficiency. That would give ~24,000 lumens, which would agree with leaftye’s assessment that they don’t really blow away the halogens, but are marginally better. There are some better COBs, even Chinese ones, that really do 100 lm/w for just a little higher price. I can’t remember who, but I remember somebody did a review of one.

As for the wire color standard. I’m not sure there is one in China where these are made. If anybody knows otherwise, I’m interested in hearing it as well. It seems to me they just do whatever arbitrary color scheme that feels right at the time. But, really, you can test it out with a multimeter pretty easily, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

As I explained on another thread, non-isolated mains-voltage lighting should use 18 gauge wiring. This has little to do with current-carrying capacity and much to do with the breaker or fuse blowing in the event of a fault before the flimsy wiring melts and sets fire to your ceiling or turns the light fitting live.

Most LED COM or SMD emitters typically run at near 100 lm/W. Anything remotely modern should be operating above 100 lm/W. How close you get to that in practice depends on the driver circuit. Expect to lose at least 10-20% converting mains AC to whatever DC your LEDs need, but 40% isn’t unusual.

If you’re depending on the fixture wire to trip the circuit breaker, you better not stop at 18ga wire, but go ahead and make it at least 16ga or larger! :open_mouth:

I was going to use the thermal camera at the shop tonight to get some images to show how this thing heats up, but it has been moved to another shop where it looks like it’ll be staying indefinitely. That’s excuse enough to buy a FLIR One. I’ll get some thermal video next week.

My LED worklight situation is limited ATM, but I’m done with halogens at work. No more accidental burns, no more blown bulbs, no more eggshell-delicate handling when hot, and LED can be cordless. For a plug-in worklight I’m using an old-fashioned drop-light with an LED bulb- it’s all the light I need. I’ll use the old halogens for recreational area lighting where their drawbacks are not much concern.

Phil

Measured 1.21 amps at 125 volts. That converts to 150 watts, which goes a long way towards explaining why the output doesn’t seem anywhere near its claims and doesn’t get hot at all. It’s pretty crazy to think that I could run 15-16 of these from a single outlet where before I could only run a single 500Wx2 halogen light.

Just over a third of its rating? That is crazy! :open_mouth:

So… what kind of mod are you going to do to it, now that you know that it’s so under-driven? Driver upgrade only?

I’ll try finding equally bad, but super inexpensive, drivers to run in parallel to double current. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll get extra emitters and optics, then go back to one driver per emitter. It’ll still use 300 watts, but should be slightly more efficient, plus I can mix tints to get closer to 5000k.

How bright do you think the LED light is now? 10000 lumen? Why not just keep the driver and buy a few COB LEDs? Buy two 100 watt COBs? Should be good for about 16000 lumen! Almost as much as the halogen and less then half the power?

Probably 20 thousand lumens. I’m open to ideas as long as they don’t cost much, otherwise I’ll get a second light. I may but those leds when I but the drivers since it doesn’t cost much more, but that mod would require optics, and I might have to machine a spacer.

I think COBs do not need optics it will just be super floody using the current reflector you have?

To me your pic of the halogen looks a lot brighter.

So, buying a better driver, so that you can run one 100w driver per emitter, is not up for consideration? Connecting multiple drivers to each LED may be a problem for the electronics. If you want to go cheap, buy transformers and rectifiers! :smiley:

The halogen certainly has a more intense hotshot. at least one of the lights were slightly pointing upwards, where the led was pointing up by roughly 10 degrees from horizontal. This is the design I’ll go for if I add emitters.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/272385350497

I think texaspyro has some threads about using those reflectors in his projects.

Wow that pricing lol! Can you tell what brand the current LEDs are in the light? Any model numbers?

I wonder if you could fit 4 of these in? You would have to lower the voltage but the amperage is correct.
https://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10013316/2250000-cree-cxa2530-60w-4000k-6000lm-cob-led-array

I’ll have to open it up again,but I’m sure it’s not cree. I don’t think those cxa emitter make sense for this light, but I may use them in an insane flashlight project. There’s plenty of room. When I get the FLIR, I’ll add a picture with both lights so you can see how huge it is.

You could always try one of these.