LED driver and wiring

[boondocker]

I have several low level LED stair lights in my house. They are Aurora AU-STL883 with a built in driver. They are all wired via the loop-in method. None of them work apart from the first one which even when it is off emits a very faint amount of light. The lights have 'no serviceable parts' according to the website product info so I swapped the only working light with the last one in the circuit. All lights now working except the original 'faulty' one. I assume a faulty driver. My question is: what's the advantage of looping the wiring when a failure of the built in driver causes all subsequent lights not to work? I suppose it's true of any lighting circuit, LED or otherwise. Would wiring via junction boxes prevent this kind of failure? Or at least, keep all the others working.

Also, elsewhere in the house, there are 8 x 1 watt spotlights connected to a single LED driver. The leads from each spotlight all come back together into a cupboard where each line and neutral have been squeezed into one of two terminal blocksThat's 8 in each block, one for line one for neutral. Is there a preferred way of connecting this many lights rather than using a block as described?

Thanks.

[GB]

Is it possible you have wired them in series?!

[boondocker]

Yes. Whoever installed the lighting circuit did so in series. Which is why nothing works after the faulty light with the faulty driver. What's the point of fitting circuits like this?

[GB]

As far as I know, it's *never* done like that.

With incandescent lights, wiring several in series makes them all drastically darker. Also, when one bulb goes out they all go out.

As LED lights use a lower wattage and are more reliable, you may be able to get away with it, but it presumably takes the driver circuits outside their designed-for input voltage, so possibly leading to early failure. Effectively, 6 of these lights in series each have a 40 volt drop across the input, rather than the designed-for 240v.

[ARW]

The answer is that they were simply wired up incorrectly. Each STL883 light needs 230V to it.

The use of loop in wiring is fine for your circuit. You may just be using the wrong terminology to describe the circuit.

Your eight 1W LEDs are constant voltage LEDs and are wired in parallel from the same driver. Some LEDs need a constant current driver and would be wired in series (there are some benefits to doing this)

[boondocker]

Apologies.

Yes, I have incorrectly used the terminology. So, regarding the tails from the 8 x 1w downlights. Is it acceptable to put 8 neutral wires in one terminal block and 8 lives in another, the driver output has been connected on the other side of the block? It's already been done and then finished off with loads of insulating tape.

It looks crap. There must be a more professional way of doing this.

[Mike Barnes]

Not what you'd call "professional", but what I'd do is to use four ways of a terminal block for each connection (eight in all). For each connection on one side there's the input and three short links; on the other side there are the eight outputs, two in each of the four ways.

[ARW]

That is the professional way:-)