How much current can pound shop Christmas LED lights take? More than you might imagine. What I find interesting is that these LEDs were ultimately killed by voltage not current. At a regulated 5V, the twelve LEDs drew about 150mA each, and survived (although they were a bit cross). At about 6V, the LEDs all fried themselves. All quite surprising really 🙂
By Julian
Youtuber, shed dweller, solar charge controller aficionado
The forward voltage of the LED's is about 3,2-3,6V so when it is used on the battery the LED's doesn't self destruct cause the supply voltage is either matching or most of the time slightly lower than forward voltage of the LED.
It's not the "more voltage" that killed them. It's the more current. But at first when you had the 5V limit you where at that limit. The power supply was in CV mode. So it was not fair to say a 3A supply wasn't enough. They could not reach the 3A.
Btw, the flickering is probably because they get hot and the very tiny bond wire onto the led chip began to come loss because of expanding and contracting. Very common in the big 100W COB leds.
Non-green color =D haha.. great video as always Julian! =D
Nice effort mate all the same!
Got something more less the same as that led set from poundland the other day except i hot wired a mobile phone battery (with protection pcb) onto it.
'no bangs' well you didn't buy them from Banggood!
I should record stuff myself more and put it on youtube. A couple of months ago I did the same with a regular led. The led kept on working but the plastic just melted.
Twas the lights before Christmas…
Nice one Julian.
I did something similar during the week with some LEDs I was given and decided to make a clip-on array for el-cheapo reading specs.
I had 6 LEDs in parallel with 180R resistors and a 4xAA battery pack. This gave me a dullish LED at the power input and very dull at the other end.
Went to a 9v battery and had some LEDs fizzle and pop so it's now soaking time to remove them from being superglued to the brass strip.
I think they were first-gen anyway, probably 9 years or older.
Julian, Have you ever come across a board on that maybe good to power generic head set mic for a system that normally requires a mic that accepts phantom power. I want to be able to flick my preamp between my xlr mic and my headset mic. just adding the power seems to gie a crappy result. maybe I could add a resistor, though not a clue what i'd need.
You have fire insurance I assume.
Four wires… well. . that is suspecis.. i would bet they are serie parallell connected.
This is probably 1.5 or 1.6V led, so they will work relatively fin with out any resistors.
Actually just puting them om 1.5V is really not that bad.
pointless!
No worries! You can still salvage the wire for other projects 😀 You have a battery box too 😀