Sheesh! Thats a lot of sustained heat to contend with! Thanks for posting your results. In your hot area installations, do the drivers lack a thermal management input from the emitter mcpcb to throttle output when high temps are reached?
You’re the one member who has a lot of experience in outdoor area lighting that we can all learn from, and Ive enjoyed reading of your experiences. :bigsmile: Ive built a few larger outdoor floodlight arrays - 13 x XML and twin Bridgelux 10k lux COBs. Ive noted that the large genuine heavy duty Meanwell drivers seem to extend the lumen maintenance a good amount longer than the cheap Chinese drivers that all the resellers list who visit the forum. Maybe because the industrial Meanwell drivers deliver much cleaner power with less ripple. I also observe a typical power factor of 99-100% with the Meanwell drivers and usually only 60-65% with the other junk. Do you have any links about the the lights your company works with, or perhaps the ones you prefer?
One of my lights is a Fuzion, designed for high sustained ambient temps and utilizes 102 Nichia 219B’s. They told me they chose those emitters because they have a higher lumen maintenance at the sustained upper heat ranges than Cree or others manufacturers. I took it apart and noted that there was no thermal control management loop to the emitters. Link to my short joke thread about it.
Now with Cree’s XHP’s being marketed as being able to operate under much higher temperatures, it’ll be interesting to see how these hold up in the field. Has your company experimented with them yet?
Im getting ready to install a large lighting project for a friend and just received some interesting expensive new lights and IR dimming controllers from RAB. 15k lumen 150 watt wide area floodlights. The housings are large heavy cast aluminum works of art with a deeply finned passive updraft cooling design and weigh about 25 lbs each. They use 6 x COB’s (probably Bridgelux Vero series) and have easy access and a quick change socket to replace a COB if one fails. The most impressive aspect for me is in the cooling design. When the light reaches full operating temp in about 1.5 hours, heat can be felt radiating above the top vent while the light remains cool enough to hold without getting burned (ambient temp 95 F). Sorry I didint measure the actual housing, but probably below 125 F.
For those reading along, Mitko is punishing his emitters at sustained extreme temps, which should have little to no bearing on your purchase decision to stick them in your flashlights or other cooler running projects.
Sorry to muddy your sales thread. I can delete this and repost to a new thread if you’d prefer…. its interesting stuff and difficult to get any accurate feedback to how these expensive lights perform in the field!