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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Not sure that would fit unless I used that to drive everything, but then there’s no room for additional drivers if this also fails to meet its rating. There are two compartments instead of one.
I’d like to see if the drivers in my light can be modded.
Brown Santa dropped off a FLIR One today. Here’s the video of a moment after startup to about 4 minutes. I like that it hardly gets warm. I recorded 43°C/109°F behind the center emitters, 35°C/95°F at the bezel. My wild guess at the room temperature is 18°C/65°F.
I thought perhaps the sensor was saturated, so I passed my hand through the video a couple of times to compare against body temperature. I suspect the shelf under the emitters is thin, which is why they are so easy to see. If I mod this to a 8x 100W light, I’ll have a thick plate of aluminum between the emitters and the shelf, and I can’t wait to see what that thermal image looks like.
Pro tip: Some platforms allow Youtube videos to be sped up 2x.
