Welcome, Neural! Now Weezard class has two students enrolled.

I will give you my opinions happily, but until my ramblings are approved or condemned by Weezard, please take them for just that: the ramblings of a convicted LED killer. imp: I can you tell things that I did that probably cost $35 per boo-boo; knowing to avoid them should help... :hippy:

I fired up the other reds, one a time, with no problems. Let them burn in for awhile; they were fairly consistent

10.8V giving 1.2A and
11.2-3V giving 1.5A.

Then, on one of many go-rounds, that first one I glued failed to light.
The higher you set the voltage on your power supply the more current the leds will draw. So, the group of 660's I got was very consistent and 10.8V would have been good for all of them. If you got 1 oddball that drew 1.2 amps at only 9V you'd need use a series resistor to prevent it from receiving more than 9V as you turn the shared supply up to 10.8V to power the "normal" leds. This is the problem with running the leds in series string. Putting that resistor on the 9V led puts it in series with all the other leds. too. So you get nowhere in terms of balancing the circuit.


DO NOT go all the way to 1.5A. This is a theoretical max and you can't run 'em that hard in the working light because, for example, if they get hotter they'll pull MORE juice, which will make them HOTTER, and so on.

1.2A is where Weezard likes to run the reds. There's a procedure for measuring Vf that employs a CC / CV bench power supply. You got wunna dem? (you can run the leds off 'em too, hint, hint).

The conventional wisdom (which I totally IGNORED when I ordered my drivers) is to mount the leds to a heatsink and see what voltage it takes to drive the led with your desired current. (using the bench suppply trick). Then you order a driver to fill that need. The Mean Well's are adjustable, so we should be able to get them dialed right in.

IF (big if) your WW and DB have almost identical Vf, and you put them in a series string, they would want ~45V to pull 1.2A each. The Mean Well claims to adjust down to 43.6V, so that should certainly work. But, you've got no simple way that I know of to balance the individual Vf's. (You know these 15Watt leds are really 4 x 5 watters in a series package, right?) They function like a "series string" of the older, individual emitters, so that's how I'm approaching putting them into the circuit. I plan on using the PLN 60-15 for my blues and wiring them in parallel so I can use balancing resistors if necessary.

You might check out the PWM controllers at Quikar.com. They look useful for balancing things out, you might be able to employ one for your fans. If you were running your reds at 11VC or so 12V case fans would work, but I'd get a second opinion on combining leds and fans on the same run.

Watt for watt, led drivers are so expensive and crap-ola wall-warts at 9-12V are sooo cheap, I plan on running the fans off their own circuit, mebbe 2, for backup.

The idea, as Weezard has said, is to waste as little energy as possible in resistors, etc. My problem is heat, so I especially don't need to be creating excess current only to dispose of it as heat.