Greetings all.... Much respect to the AS community. I have been using and following the algae scrubber scene for some time now but only recently started using DIY lighting. I built the lights from information gathered from several threads in the forum and they have been working flawlessly for several months now. 1x Meanwell LPC-35-700 driver 8x Luxeon ES deep red 660 leds (from stevesleds) The fixtures are wired in parallel 4 leds each. Well last night.. because of my low stocking level I decided to unplug one of the fixtures so the screen would only be lit from one side (I had done this while building the lights and all was well). The still plugged in fixture lit up a little brighter (as I expected it would) but died not long after (did not expect this). Naturally I plugged in the other fixture but that one never lit up. I killed them all! My question is why did they blow and how should I have gone about using a single fixture? Happy Wednesday.. Cheers!
I can't see anything inherently wrong with your wiring, etc...that's kind of odd for Luxeons on an LPC-35-700 to blow like that. Unless there is a minimum load that the driver needs to supply and you were below that, if that's the case (I'd have to look at the spec sheet) then it's possible there wasn't enough Vdrop and that forced an odd situation, but rather than over-driving the LEDs I would have expected the MW to shut off. Maybe that's happened? Did you test all the LEDs individually? Odd that the 2nd fixture didn't even light up and just blew....it at least should have flashed
Even odder that you had them in parallel, so 2 arrays of 4 in parallel equals one array of 4 in series, so that tosses my thought out the window on the under-voltage issue. I'm a bit baffled
Yep tested them all with the tester pictured. Should I get conductivity across a blown led? And can I test the MW? Maybe it developed an issue..
You might be conductivity depending on how it failed. Not sure how to test the MW other than hooking it up to a load of some kind (more LEDs)
Alrighty. Thanks for the help. I ordered some more LEDs so we'll see how it goes. I plan to use a single fixture with the LEDs wired in parallel. Cheers.
