Testing a $1300 120,000lm water-cooled LED | Hacker News Reader

Testing a $1300 120,000lm water-cooled LED

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40 pointsfortran778 comments

Loved watching this. The home-made heat sink is pretty sweet.

From the get-go, the sketchiest part of this was watching him wiring the power supplies in series, and lo and behold, that’s what failed.

Power electronics are super dangerous and I wouldn’t DIY any of this stuff myself. That being said, I’d probably simplify the power setup. Wall voltage AC to 30V DC can be done with a single component (quick search on Digikey makes it clear), but that’s not a super common transformation, so it’s kinda niche.

High power is tough. I’d be really interested to understand how an AC ago DC converter works will handle high wattage without frying —- AC to DC has some loss (call it 20%) and you could still have a few hundred watts in your converter. That’s probably why the power supplies fried, that loss. I wonder if he could get a AC to DC converter and mount it on an expanded heat sink, safely.

Again all this is super dangerous, but I ain’t the one with a YouTube channel.

Cringe-worthy on multiple levels. Instead of monitoring LED temp, he monitored cooling water temp to test his cooling system. Of course, you might consider putting his fingers on the heatsink as monitoring, lol. On a less critical note, he did follow British plumbing standards ...

I like this guy. I think he's better at his mechanical builds than his electronics builds, but we can't' be good at anything.

Agreed. He's a likable chap.

But I'm not a fan of "builders" that get into high-energy projects, especially when they demonstrate disregard for safety. Using your fingers to check for high temp and doubling ordinary sunglasses around high-intensity light sets a bad example for even less-capable followers.

I also wonder if you need to water cool it—-a lot of that 1500W is getting blasted out as light, unlike a processor, which dumps it all to heat.

Misleading title, it's not a $1300 LED but rather a panel of many LEDs

It should be an LED Array. This is one single piece of monolithic silicon. Quite impressive. I need to sell my 16Mcp flash light. The company makes a 10x10 LED Array. The 10x10 required a very large CPU cooler, and still gets a bit hot.

And it's not the title of the video.

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