[APD] Re: LED Lighting

["Giancarlo Podio" <gp at isaconsulting_com>]

As others have said, overdriving LEDs is a quick way to kill them or reduce
their brightness. Last time I seriously looked into using LEDs for lighting
up an aquarium I ended up deciding to wait it out until prices drop. At the
time the 1W had just come out and it was as expensive as the 5W is today. My
plans were to use a pulse generator to power the LEDs, this allows you to
run them brighter (at their vmax) without burning them out, if you don't
have a quality pulse generator however it may not be worth the extra cost.
There are several power supply designs to run LEDs for high power
applications, if you know your way around a circuit diagram you shouldn't
have any problems making one. There are also industrial and automotive
drivers for high power leds, they may not be worth it unless they can power
up a large array however. Here is one example:
http://www.melexis.com/prodmain.asp?family=MLX10801

I had also planned to use a mixture of 5000K white leds with individual RGB
leds wired to individual power sources. This would allow me to individually
increase or decrease a certain color giving me a wide range of color
temperatures to choose from. Also consider the lower powered LEDs, if you
have the patience to solder all of them, you can probably save some money by
buying lower powered white leds in bulk and simply using more of them. Take
a look here:
http://energy.sourceguides.com/businesses/byP/light/LEDLighting/byB/dist/byN/byName.shtml
(the second in the list looks interesting: http://www.hebeiltd.com.cn/)

I definitely would not run such an investment on a cheap transformer
however. A PC power supply could easily do the job, it's cheap, well
filtered and has multiple outputs.

There is also a company that produces LED replacement fixtures for regular
street lighting. They sell large arrays for around $250 each, I tried
looking for the link but I can't find it, they are probably cheaper now too.

Giancarlo Podio

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