Hi all. One of my Sc***fix 5ft LAP Batten's has given up the ghost so I decided I had nowt to lose and took the end-caps off to see if I could sort it without having to resort to forking out another £40 forra new one.
The layout is 2 x semi-rigid strips, (160 each) connected in 8 parallel groups of 40 series-connected 2835 (I think, judging by their size) LED's. All the LED's and tracks test OK. I can't find any data on the existing driver unit, other than a reference to an almost identical one on a Polish website but that one has only suffered from a blown fuse. Mine, as you can see from the attached pics has spat it's dummy out
. There are no resistors on the strip so I'm presuming it will be a constant current setup ? Anyway, I checked one of my other battens and when it's on, the output from the driver seems to show roughly 120v which seems to tally with my understanding of a 2835 requiring a forward voltage of about 3V, so 40 X 3V = 120V. However, it's the current side I'm not 100% sure of, which is where I hope you guys can help ?
As far as I can tell the 2835 takes 60mA to drive it, so I guess that will be .18W each. So shouldn't 320 of them total about 57.6W ? The problem is the failed driver seems to have 43W written on it and everywhere I look online seems to point to getting a driver that will have a 20% "allowance" over the actual load, therefore suggesting that an 80W unit would be the best bet ? If I am right in my understanding of all this, is it also the case that a constant current driver will self-regulate the correct voltage for the LED setup, so what I have to do to get the correct spec is to look for a 60W Constant Current Driver that has 120V in its output range ?
Hopefully that'll be the case coz it looks like drivers in that range are about £20 or so, whereas a new Batten is closer to £45 !
TIA
The layout is 2 x semi-rigid strips, (160 each) connected in 8 parallel groups of 40 series-connected 2835 (I think, judging by their size) LED's. All the LED's and tracks test OK. I can't find any data on the existing driver unit, other than a reference to an almost identical one on a Polish website but that one has only suffered from a blown fuse. Mine, as you can see from the attached pics has spat it's dummy out
. There are no resistors on the strip so I'm presuming it will be a constant current setup ? Anyway, I checked one of my other battens and when it's on, the output from the driver seems to show roughly 120v which seems to tally with my understanding of a 2835 requiring a forward voltage of about 3V, so 40 X 3V = 120V. However, it's the current side I'm not 100% sure of, which is where I hope you guys can help ?As far as I can tell the 2835 takes 60mA to drive it, so I guess that will be .18W each. So shouldn't 320 of them total about 57.6W ? The problem is the failed driver seems to have 43W written on it and everywhere I look online seems to point to getting a driver that will have a 20% "allowance" over the actual load, therefore suggesting that an 80W unit would be the best bet ? If I am right in my understanding of all this, is it also the case that a constant current driver will self-regulate the correct voltage for the LED setup, so what I have to do to get the correct spec is to look for a 60W Constant Current Driver that has 120V in its output range ?
Hopefully that'll be the case coz it looks like drivers in that range are about £20 or so, whereas a new Batten is closer to £45 !
TIA
