DIY LED Using 10 Watt Arrays

[hillegom]

wow nice
You are not only into electronics, but an artist as well
Well done

[daplatapus]

That looks sweet Mike, Nice work!

[mseepman]

Nicely Done!

[mike31154]

Thank you for the encouragement everyone! It's most welcome. I was up until past midnight yesterday replacing those two stupid outer rails of LEDs. Another few hours this morning hooking the wires back up.

The cover does have some flaws, a few cracks & tears from drilling the larger holes & stresses from bending. Don't show up in the photos! Nice thing about wood is that I should be able to patch it up & once the stain is on, will be harder to see the booboos. Will take a few more days until I finish it up. It certainly will be nice to have the mess of wiring covered up. I've read more than the odd post where folks tend to shy away from DIY fixtures due to the industrial look of the end product. Next build will probably involve a canopy, so it won't matter!

Electrical & instrumentation was my trade in the Air Force. I've taken on a few woodworking projects over the years since I enjoy that as a hobby. I work on my old 'yota & motorbikes too. I tend to take forever to finish stuff though.

[mike31154]

Time for another update, this time due to a boo boo. Really should have seen this one coming, but kind of let it slide.

Been running the center rail with 4 whites & 5 blues on two dimmers. This means at full power of 1 amp per LED, the white dimmer would need to handle 4 amps & the blue dimmer 5 amps. Well within their rating & since I've got the voltage around 8 to 8.5 (a volt or two below the recommended voltage of 9 to 10), there's an added safety buffer with respect to current. So why would I run the both outer rails on only 2 dimmers? There are 5 Royal Blue & 4 10000K White LEDs on each outer rail. This means the RB dimmer handles a total of 8 LEDs & the 10000K dimmer deals with 10. If I were to run the RBs & 10000K LEDs at full power (0.9 amp for RB & 1.0 amp for 10000K), the RB dimmer would be at maximum rated current & the White would actually be over the limit by 2 amps. Clearly I know better, but I guess since I had the voltage down at 5 volts for the first year of running the LEDs, I kind of got complacent.

I recently replaced the 2 power supplies with slightly larger ones, my rationale being that with the extra power, the supplies should run cooler & safer. Not sure if this had anything to do with cooking the RB dimmer, but it wasn't long after this change that I noticed the RBs were very dim. I played around with the dimmer control & the LEDs hardly changed, just flickered. Photo tells the story, this is what a cooked dimmer looks like. The parts at the top of the photo are from a second dimmer that I patched in after finding the first one cooked. It started smoking a few minutes after I hooked it up. Might be able to save that one with a new MOSFET. What puzzles me is why the RB dimmer went & not the 10000K. After all it's running 2 more LEDs & it continues to soldier on with no sign of overheating. I have 5 dimmers on order & will be adding two to split the load & correct my faux pas. In the meantime, the tank's been looking a little whiter without the Royal Blues doing their thing for the last week or so. Livestock seems ok with it, but I'm anxious to get the RBs back on line.