Inside the Watt Controlled LED Driver

Assistant Marketing Manager for Deco Lighting Amanda Keen wrote a great post on her company's Blog recently on how our Commerce, California-based partners have come up with a watt-controlled driver for their lighting products that is outperforming the competition in this ever changing marketplace. 

Keen wrote that most LED Drivers are only capable of operating in mild environments, rated for operation up to 75° or 80° Celsius (167°F or 176°F) and remarked that temperatures inside a lighting fixture are often higher than this.

"Small fixture compartments and poor air circulation can generate extreme heat, often coming close to temperatures that boil water," wrote Keen.  "The heat results in damage to the driver’s battery-like electrolytic capacitors. The electrolyte, which is typically a gel, evaporates over the life of the capacitor’s components. Higher operating temperatures speed up this evaporation, shortening the life of the capacitor and leading to premature driver failure."

It appears that Deco Lighting has solved the dilemma of premature power supply failure by utilizing watt-controlled drivers designed to stand up to extreme heat. Unlike other LED drivers, Deco LED watt-controlled drivers are rated for operation up to 90° Celsius (194 °F).

"Our process focuses on making the driver operate cooler and longer than the competition," wrote Keen.

Deco Lighting's  driver components are positioned on the circuit board in a manner that prevents the build-up of heat. Also, their circuit boards are arranged in a way that allows Deco Lighting driver components to touch the metal housing so the driver components can be used as a heat sink. Also, Deco insulates key heat-sensitive components inside the driver.

Interesting to note, Deco Lighting ensures quality in every component that comprises their LED lighting fixtures, from high-quality Nichia LEDs to finely-engineered heat transfer castings to state-of-the-art drivers. GET,LLC has these on Guam and would be happy to arrange a presentation.

It is for these reasons why we are so bullish about Deco Lighting. Yes. Deco Lighting offers a ten-year, one hundred thousand hour warranty, which includes labor. Deco’s warranty backs up the confidence they have in their products-we stand ready here and across Micronesia to support them.

For more information about Deco's LED drivers or other products please check out our website at www.get-guam.com or call us at 671-483-0789 to discuss solutions for your important lighting needs-All Made in America!!!

Lumens-Are you getting your money's worth?

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based LEDs Magazine re-released an 2012 article recently as a way of reminding lighting reps and manufacturers alike that we should keep a close eye on the relationship between the latest technology in light-emitting diode (LED) lighting and the delivery of lumens as advertised.  

The article says that LED efficacy has been improving similarly to the evolution of the microprocessor of today's computers, but LED-based illumination designs are not consistently taking advantage of capabilities such as brighter operation at higher drive currents. 

"Today, luminaire manufacturers may find that the surest path to lower system cost is to take advantage of the full LED operating capacity or lumen output that they are already paying for while relying on the growing statistical evidence that they can do so and deliver long product life.

Advances in the production of lighting class, high power LEDs should cause the lighting industry to reassess how to create cost-optimal, LED-based designs. Several advanced LED manufacturers have developed a large and expanding body of information concerning performance maintenance of LEDs over time and temperature. This knowledge of long-term behavior is now standardized. The highest quality parts and in well-designed systems, LEDs can operate at high current and high temperature levels with fewer performance penalties than ever before. This same data calls into question legacy luminaire and driver design methodology that has yielded systems that drive the LEDs around binning-current levels rather than over a wide range of drive currents and temperatures.

Using LEDs at higher operating capacity can deliver more lumens per LED with a corresponding reduction in system cost. For many lighting applications, more aggressively priced products can be created with reduced component count. Such a design methodology can result in higher operating temperatures and lower efficacy. Still, taking full advantage of an LED’s operating capacity becomes an attractive option for applications requiring maximum lumen output at a reduced cost."

Writers and critics will say  LEDs have far more luminous capacity than most designers are using. The highest quality LEDs are capable of operating at sustained, elevated currents and temperatures far above manufacturers' binning information. New luminaire and lamp designs should take advantage of these attributes. For lighting class LEDs, there is no reliability penalty for using more of this capacity.

To learn more about the lighting products that GET, LLC provides, including the LED lines of our partners, Independence LED Lighting and Deco Lighting Inc., please check out our website at www.get-guam.com or call us at 671-483-0789 to discuss solutions for your important lighting needs-All Made in America!!!

LED Spec Assistance-Use of External Drivers

In an attempt to provide assistance to specification writers that are tasked with identifying the most cost-effective energy efficient lighting for their commercial, industrial and federal government properties GET, LLC through our friends at Independence LED Lighting offer up advice to help those writers and readers of this blog to identify key specification areas of focus in the use of LED lighting technology. 

Our focus: external drivers.

External drivers, a key selling point of LED lighting, have multiple efficiency, smart control, operation, and life safety advantages over Internal Drivers.  It is suggested that by separating the heat created by the drivers from the LEDs on the linear “Tube” modules, the combined system runs more efficiency, maintains its color more consistently, and lasts longer. Heat is simply the enemy of the LED. 

Also external drivers provide increased flexibility over internal drivers, when it comes to maximizing future connectivity for dimming, occupancy sensors, light harvesting, alert signals, and WIFI control. Many end users are focused, in the short term, on the energy savings with LEDs but the modular advantage of an external system is the ability to improve the technology as it evolves by connecting into other smart controls.

Since the external driver is a separate module, it can be easily replaced in the same way that a fluorescent ballast is replaced upon failure without throwing out the whole tube. This is the simple model of “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”, since the LEDs and the tube component are more valuable than the driver component. Modularity creates operating as well as energy efficiency. Think of the driver as the starter on a car or the power supply on a computer. It is best to specify Non-Proprietary Drivers for maximum flexibility over time to purchase if necessary additional drivers.  For failure diagnostics, if a tube goes dark completely then the failure is most likely in the driver versus any of the diodes on the tube, but personnel can always easily cross check by simply connecting a failed tube to a nearby fixture. Given that the drivers are the weakest link in the LED system, request a nominal extra inventory of drivers (e.g. 1 per 100 Tube sets) to have at hand in the event of failure. This is not unlike stocking extra ballasts in a project.

Finally, fluorescent tube fixtures to date have been typically designed to bring alternating current (AC) line voltage typically at 120V to 240V into the fixture and then step it down to safer lower voltage via the fluorescent ballast to Direct Current (DC). The danger of using internal driver LED tubes is that the step down to the lower voltage occurs inside the tube. So the installer of internal drivers bypass the ballast and run the higher voltage directly into the socket “tombstones” of the fixture. This means that the dangerous line voltage is right at hand in the fixture. If personnel touch the sockets, they WILL RECEIVE A SHOCK, and they are at risk of falling back off a ladder at the 120V level breaking an arm, hitting their heads, or worse.  There is an increased likelihood of  fatality for fixtures that are powered with higher 240V with the internal drivers. By contrast, external driver LED technology mirrors the model of the original fixture design by replacing the fluorescent ballast with the external driver and stepping down the voltage as it is fed into the tubes for increased safety.  LED tube solutions should include options for external drivers that are non-proprietary  to a sole source, so that the drivers can be replaced if necessary either during or after warranty periods. 

Need an LED solution for your facility? Check out our website at www.get-guam.com or give GET, LLC a call at 671-797-0789.  We are a provider of Independence LED Lighting and Deco Lighting Inc. products-Made in America!!!