LED Flood Light Failure

I had a few filament style GLS LEDs that slowly got dimmer and dimmer over time.

Or dodgy cap in the PSU..

This was sudden, It's not used much pretty well only to put the rubbish/recycling out once a fortnight. It was fine two weeks ago...

Got it down, considering it's been up ten+ years the lamp itself is in preety good nick. Same can't be said for the bit of bent mild steel bracket or the steel bolts fixing lamp to bracket.

Took the back cover off, all nice, clean, dry no sign of corrosion or damp anywhere. Took glass off, again all clean and dry no obvious problems. Fit plug to flying lead, switch on, dim, PSU had it's output voltage on it so got probes of meter to see what it was outputing. Prod probe onto one of the LED module connections and POW blinded... Trying to shield eyes from the module but still be able to see the connections a couple of mm away from the light source was fun. The -ve one seemed a bit iffy, reflowed both (despite spots before the eys), better but not 100% solid. I think there must be a dodgey connection within the LED module. It works for now and it'll go back up for the time being.

Putting it back will require a bit of improvisation as the corroded bolts have expanded and cracked the thin diecast bit of the lamp that they are threaded into. One side fell away as I was undoing the bolt and there's not a lot holding the otherside.

Pity they didn't use stainless bolts and ali for the bracket. All the cover screws are stainless.

Anyone recomend an IP65 10 W LED flood, preferably dark skies friendly, that doesn't have a mild steel bracket or bolts?

LED lamps are mostly either a string of separate LEDs or a single COB unit (yes there are others like filament LEDs). If separate LEDs I'd short each LED one at a time to see which faulty one was causing the problem, and leave the badun shorted. If none fix it, the problem is elsewhere. Be warned the LEDs are sometimes connected to live! And if one LED looks different to the others, don't short that one! It's likely the current limiter.

NT

I used the 30w version of one of these recently:

The filament type are just long thing COB type

Black specs within the individual chips are often a clue

every chinky floodlight I have bought has failed went back to the conventional 500w jobs

I changed to LEDs because the tungsten ones had a very short life. Not regretting it at all. Units were bought from TLC. Perhaps if you weren't so tight and bought decent quality ones, they'd have lasted? However, I didn't expect to find or even look for ones which were a 500W equivalent.

Probably a failure in the psu section, ie its running on ac or something like that due to a bridge rectifier failure or they are wired opposite way round and only half are on at once so one leg fails and only half the leds work. Brian

Or, shock horror its full of water!

Brian

It might have been ok if it had been plated or even painted instead of the usual let it see the nozzle of a spray can type we get these days on brackets and bolts. Brian