You can calculate the ratio between cost of strips and cooling, so if strips cost 15$ and cooling 15$, you always have the choice of just halving heat by doubling strips.
That's kind of my concern, say I am running 800w of led now and I am fighting to control heat. Would it be less heat generated if I spread those 800w over 50 strips? Or would it be the same amount of heat as my 2 400w panels just spread over the 50 strips? Wouldn't a watt generate the same btu of heat either way?
I am not worried about cooling the chips as much as I am with removing heat from the room with the liquid cooling idea.
Yeah, I guess others already answered this, but when giving advise I hadn't realized you had a sealed room. I was thinking about led-strip heat, not room heat.
The formulas to calculate heat are quite straight forward, you have a watt which is efficient to some %... the rest is heat... So 100w at 50% efficiency would generate 50w of heat.
So strips, heat sinks, drivers, wagos and double sided tape ordered.
I presented my build to a family member with a electrical engineering degree and background in led design. I had hoped to impress him with my design and see if I could glean any tips from him on clean wiring.
What ended up happening was a beat down on the dangers of parallel wiring and LEDs. Since then I have been reading about thermal runaway.
So I was hoping to have a comeback for my uncle on why parallel is the way to go for my build. He also suggested using smaller drivers like 1 per 2 strips rather than 1 driver for 5 or 10 strips due to lethal DC voltage at those currents.
So why do the guides suggest parallel over series? I already ordered drivers for a parallel build and would rather use them than return them if it's safe.
He also suggested using smaller drivers like 1 per 2 strips rather than 1 driver for 5 or 10 strips due to lethal DC voltage at those currents.
this is something I always wondered about.. but never got a clear answer.. I always thought amperage kills you not volts.. whether it's a.c. or d.c. 110v a.c. don't kill me when I get bit.. then you got 50,000 - 100,000 v d.c. tasers that stun over killing you.. it's gotta be the minimal amperage that doesn't kill you.. at lease that's how I always figured it worked..
but then with that theory, parallel should be more dangerous with higher amperage.. but they also say stay under 250v in series because it's dangerous.... so I get lost!!!!!
I've wired both ways and like parallel better.. mainly for the ability to add more boards/strips later and have same wattage at a higher efficacy.
It is the current that kills but you need high enough voltage to overcome the resistance of skin in order to get the current flowing.
That’s why you can grab both posts of a 12V battery in your car (at least with dry skin) and not even feel it. The battery is capable of delivering hundreds of amps but the voltage is simply not high enough to get it flowing though you. It would only take a matter of milliamps to kill you.
Want to Support the Site?
Use this Amazon referral link and any purchase you make within 24 hrs will earn LEDgardener a commission at no cost to you!
There is always the possibility of thermal runaway with parallel wiring of LEDs but I think it’s more likely to happen with cheap LEDs than the high quality stuff we use with tight voltage bins. If you are concerned about it, you could also fuse each of the strips. It could prove pretty difficult to manage so many small drivers with 1 or 2 strips, but that would be the safest solution. Unless of course the wiring was so convoluted that it became a hazard itself
If you think about it, the LEDs on quantum boards or COBs or strips are all wired in parallel groups themselves. A Quantum Board is made up of 16 groups of diodes, all connected in parallel (each group has 18 diodes in series). Same principal goes for strips and COBs. A Samsung strip might have 9 or 18 parallel groups of LEDs. The argument against this may be that the diodes that are together on each unit would be very tightly matched and that there may be variance between different strips/boards/whatever, but again - I think it comes down to high-quality binning.
If ChilLED Tech and HLG both support the use of parallel wiring for their products in their documentation, it’s good enough for me. It’s ultimately up to you and your comfort level though because the risk is there.
Want to Support the Site?
Use this Amazon referral link and any purchase you make within 24 hrs will earn LEDgardener a commission at no cost to you!
Thank you very much for the replies, I feel much more comfortable now. I didn't mean to come across as unappreciative or anything like that. I spent a couple weeks researching this build(reading what knowledgable people post) when I should have been taking the time to actually learn.
I greatly appreciate the time and effort put into sharing this tech with the masses. This is an awesome site with very helpful people. Keep up the good work.
I am going to be paralleling my strips with fuses for each one. My electrical engineer uncle drew up a circuit for each board with a mosfet and resistors that he says would limit current with no loss to efficiency.
I may also try to incorporate it into my build but it seems like it would get bulky and simply fusing each strip makes me able to sleep at night.
Thanks again for taking the time to help a novice get a handle on the mysteries of the universe.
Not to take up anymore of your time but what ohm resistors would be appropriate for this and what kind of losses to efficiency are we talking. I went with a hlg-h600-48b driver. The tool doesn't have these as an option yet.
