What is the mA rating of your constant current LED downlighters?

[joth]

I'm surprised I'm asking this, but does anyone have good tips on sourcing integrated LED downlighters at reasonable prices (ideally around £15) with a known/documented constant current rating?

I have a bunch of OSRAM 35W optitronic DALI dimmer drivers I picked up for peanuts, rated at 350-1000mA, now struggling to find suitable LED downlighters. Ideally 500-700mA range (to make best use of the capacity I have available).

https://www.ledz.uk.com/product/ls/fixed-downlight/ look quite nice, but so called "specification grade" meaning £45+ ea.

 

I picked up a £11 Inegral LED  that comes with a 300mA driver. If I chuck out their driver and use my own it does work quite nicely (obviously adjusting the LEDset resistor down appropriately). So I'm really looking to see if there are any other "driver included" good-enough quality modules out there come with a greater current rating (ideally 500mA+, but at least 350...), and with the driver independently wired such that I can unplug the provided one and use my own? (Or even better, come with an LED-only option, no driver needed).

Aurora / Enlight stuff looks good but AFAICT the drivers are all welded on, not suitable for disconnecting.

 

 

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I've found that the current rating for the constant current ones tends to be 300 mA, with the voltage then changing for the higher power ones.  We have several 3 W nominal lights that run at 300 mA ~10 VDC and some 6 W nominal ones that run at 300 mA, ~20 VDC, both are the low profile round panel light type, that seem to give a very even light spread.  I had problems with RFI from some of the constant current supplies, so ended up throwing them out and using a different arrangement that, thankfully, doesn't create loads of RFI

[joth]

@JSHarris thanks - this is interesting.

Searching online for "Constant Current LED" brings up no end of articles explaining CC vs CV principles, and invariably they seem to state constant current LEDs typically are 350mA or 700mA; it's trivial to find drivers in those ratings but LEDs themselves is much more work! I suspect I'll find more 300mA then, same as you then.

FWIW - the integral one I tested is rated 6W and is about 15V @ 300mA. The thought of course crosses my mind to put 2 or even 3 of these in parallel to jack up the current I can load onto them, but that's asking for "cascading failure" trouble ...!

 

Part of the reason I'm going down this path is an aversion to mains voltage dimming (at least, with any non resistive loads).  I've had the widely recommended Varilight V-Pros in the past, with a mixture of CFL and LED on different circuits they were damn noisy, and a bit erratic to be honest. (So much so that our tenant complained, and our mismanagement agent ripped them out and binned them without consulting us, back when we were living overseas for a few years). 

 

Hence why I've got myself into this combined dimmer+driver misadventure. But I do think it will give a better result in the end. - certainly in testing so far, the whole setup was deadly quite right through the dimming range.

 

[SiBee]

I deal with the Aurora rep for our area ( Southport, Merseyside, Blackpool) from time to time and he is a knowledgeable guy. I could pm his email address from work tomorrow if that helps? Nice guy, sure he could help regarding Aurora/ en lite products.

For what it’s worth, I do like Aurora and en lite stuff and ask my wholesaler to bring it in. They don’t rate it but then they are always pushing their own brands. I trust my eyes and hands and experience with stuff more.