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.
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!
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! 
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.
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.
Cree CXA2530 60W 4000K 6000LM COB LED Array Emitter
Real Cree stuff, specs you can rely on. :STEVE:
Possible AC drivers:
Two per COB emitter should do nice without being overbearing (≈1,2A). Of course, there may be cheaper options. 
Cheers ^:)
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.
I’m gonna follow the progress on this. We have this problem a lot at work. All but handheld work lights are still halogen power suckers with too much heat in some of the spaces we have to work in. And I already have guys asking about mods for their handheld led’s. Once they get me one new still in the box I will begin looking into it.
Great thread.
Let's see: 
You said around 150W at the input. If, let's say, 5/6 of that power is dissipated in that heatsink through the emitters, peak heatsink °C/W = 25/125 = 0,2°/W.
800W plus 0,2°/W means 160° above ambient. Great news! It'll look close to an electric heater, before the emitters blow up. :-)
Cheers ^:)
That was just behind the emitter. Heat quickly dropped off away from the emitter. Since emitters would be spaced out, it wouldn’t be that bad. Upping the current is what would really pile on the heat since LED’s get less efficient as current goes up.
Current to each emitter would stay the same though. I’m talking about 800W worth of over rated chinese drivers, so it’d only double what’s already in the light, so really 300W. There’s room to cram 8 drivers in, but 16 would be pushing it, and that would still only get 600 watts. With 300W, it won’t get that much hotter, and might even run cooler if my big spacer distributes heat to the fins much more evenly. Drivers to get an honest 800W, much less Cree COB’s, are way beyond my budget for this light. They would be awesome to use, but it’s not happening right now unless someone else is paying for it. 
First mod will be doubling the drivers to each emitter for 66W each, then later I’ll double the emitters and come back down to 33W each. The latter mod should run cooler and produce more light than the first.