Inside the Aldi 5W LED bulkhead light. (With schematic.)

an LED bulkhead laid someone mentioned these I thought they were in littles they weren't I went a little looking for them they weren't there and it just so happened that local is a place called holidays and they had these so I bought one to take a look at so this is a typical set of wall-mounting light you put next to your front door or back door whatever you wanted light in that corridor some of that and it's a waterproof exterior fixture and technically speaking I should be showing you this let let's zoom down a little bit and I'm wondering what type of technology it's going to use is it going to use speech would first apply the sort of standard transformer based one or is it going to use a little buck regulator or is it going to use a capacitive dropper which I'm think it could well do or it may be using the new wife gonna say driverless but they're not really driveless than out calling them Dobbs driver on board type ships so let's say I find out what's in the st. this it claims to be five watt which is that fits well within all those technologies so let's get the electrical cover off ooh simple enough it's got a bright yellow steel in there it's got the little turn-on block now technically speaking I should show you this lit actually just seen something that's good the aluminium is visible on the back of the LED panel in here where the wires go through I need to wire this up so we can see it lit and see that flickers do I have a flags keep in mind I'm currently in Crewe accommodation alone so I'm just trying to think I could use as a flex what comes to mind is cuts and lead off my toothbrush charge or do I really want to do that yes I do so I want to see this lit one moment please all right well that's not gonna reach much longer so I'd like to thank Steve my coworker from the Lewes snips but we ask what do you think I forgot here I've hooked the wiring things worthy of note they've got little crimps on the end of this and they're kind of just pushed in a bit too far and it just makes it that hard bit hard terminate your parent actually pulling these wires out a little bit but the war has been terminated in let's see if it flickers horribly and just in case it does flicker horribly on camera I'll warn you too that it's going to possibly go to Flickr just in case any of you have photosensitive disorders so let's try it it likes instantly let's just try that again I don't know Flickr that's good okay that's pretty interesting it looks as though there's LEDs all the way along here so that's kind of neat okay let's open it up now you've seen it lit sure I shall pop these Marta again or will pop no one pop no again I tell you what let's get their camera back into position because you know I've gone back over here oh but before I do that these are built-in USB sockets and put out three volts under even a low load that's a the perils of built-in electronics but let's return to the subject in hand other things worth mentioning now that it does come with little knockouts on the side and it comes with a plugs that go into those and specifically main she's not used flat cabling to endure so they're expecting some sort of where the rated flex are something to come out at the wall they also go into detail in the instructions about drilling holes diagonally down as you're going out of your building if we're running key below and drip loops so it's quite a comprehensive set of instructions let's get the back off this so this came from Aldys now there's two shops in UK one well there's lots of shops you keep this tube of chain stores one is called Aldi and one's called little I think they may be owned by brothers and there's the serve rivals and they're a very similar style of shop is very much stack it high it's quite cheap stuff and it's good stuff I think so German tune and Audi's normally brings in served well littles actually normally brings in stuff every mangyans thirsty I think they bring in some gadgets and things like that just to get people into the shop and littles tends to have the stuff oh all sort of oh we long so it's always quite interesting win because their stuff is it's quite novel it's good for junky gadgets I'll be going in there again looking for stuff I think that maybe where Julian eyelet recently got the air the batteries and chargers so there's a seal in a lip on the dome the cover and it is dog driver on board so let's add take a closer look at this you know what will I reverse engineer for snow let's take a closer look first so just to get your up a bit closer so I'm just gonna pause and stick a box under so we can lift this up and get a more detailed image so it's one of these slightly annoying circuit boards it's single sided c-couldn't value annum back with the fiberglass shim laid in the front app to see the neutral looks a bit blobby like air it's not been quite up to temperature when it goes soldered and I won't put that too hard in case it pops off it's got the metal oxide varistor it's got what looks like an inrush limiting fo fusible resistor one yep such inrush and fusible resistor there it's got the bridge rectifier it's got the chip there current regulating chip and then the LEDs are that sod these two LEDs are in parallel but these ones are in series and then it was parallel again at the corners all the corners of the LEDs and parallel is that just because there's less heat sink in that area I reckon and or is it because of the curvature that they just require less light in that area not sure Assad I've not seen that done before um it has a little capacitor a resistor I can't read these values so I'm going to have to pause to reverse engineer and see if I can find a number on this and can we see let's say sometimes if I just superzoom write down like this I'm empty spot number no it's gone into super granular zoom so not quite what about there how can more or less see the value on the resistors is that 10 ohm to our 4 2 point 4 ohm 105 that's a the 105 is the air well it's a 1 mega ohm resister I'm not sure that's 4 than the capacitor ok one moment please I'm just going to reverse engineer this behold this schematic so I've measured some component values that is a def where 10 ohm resistor the fusible resistor on the input there's a metal oxide varistor across it for spec protection that's kind of important these circuits because a voltage spike if this chip doesn't react in time will cause quite high current through the LEDs then it goes through the LEDs and that's where it does get strange if you look at these LEDs on this thing or just unplug us again I've been doing electrical tests the corners do have the LEDs as parallel pairs so there's four parallel pairs but the rest is actually individual LEDs I'm going by the voltage I've measured across those LEDs but trash I'll do that for you then again and measure about 15 volts cross the LEDs which suggests there's actually five chips inside each those packages that's not uncommon that just allows them to increase the voltage across the LED because in this application it lets them use less LEDs the voltage is higher across them so the combined LED voltage is around about two hundred and ten volts across that the LED current flows to LEDs and then comes the chip the chip had a number on it which I've just forgotten but it doesn't really matter anyway I shall put it down in the comments down below in the description down below but it's a very vague it's a four character chord it's it I couldn't find anything at home I think it's possibly a standard chip in fact of a sneaky feeling it may be one of these ones it's divided into two half but I'm not really sure about that the subway the circuitry is configured there's a one mega ohm resistor which I think is possibly supplying the power to the chip itself for biased internal transistor is on its can input but that's also decoupled from the zero volt real the negative real by this 10 nano farad capacitor I measured that in the circuit so I'm not upset sure what it's real values but it came very close to 10 nano fired one way around which was pretty typical for that volume we've got their negative connection which there's two actually on this chip that go down to the circuit of real here and then there's the sense resistors which are two point four ohm and ten ohm in series giving twelve point four ohms and the way that works the chip will regulate current current will flow through these and when the voltage on here reaches a certain threshold it will then start regulating back this will probably have thermal protection as well so it gets too hot it will start regulating down that's to protect itself that's all to protect LEDs it means that in an over-voltage situation or just where there's not enough ventilation this bill like many of these devices do start at it's five watt rating and then sort of gradually reducing power and its rating i've measured the AC current and have not measured the DC current because it's not that practical to do so without actually break into the circuit somewhere here I can't even get client meter around anything because this is an hour medium back panel how much that was in a shot was I just randomly yeah okay right that's that's okay so not sure what this says there these pins are not used it may be one of those ones that had the chip serve has a flipped version a second channel but that's it so this chip here acts just as a electronically active variable resistor and measures the current through these once it reaches a certain level the voltage there rises up to the point that it starts regulating back and then it just dissipates the excess power as heat like a resistor but one that's dynamically adjusting to fit these now I do notice that there's no smoothing in this so it's really strange that the Karen didn't pick up flicker it did well there I would have expected quite a bit of flicker particularly given the fact that the combine for voltage about two hundred ten volts so if that's the same way of humps coming from the rectifier and that's about 330 volts that would be about there that it's turning on so it's only actually lit for that part of the same each same wave but there we go so now I shall show you some basic electrical tests will plug it in and we'll probe it so I'll just reposition the camera for that so excuse the swampy a with light the first test going to do is I'm going to precariously measure across one of these LEDs and see if I can meet connection because it's those tiny little air surface mounted silver connections here we go 15 volts across that led divided by three gives the air with five chips the other test going to do here I'm gonna flip this over I'll turn it off entirely while I do this let's turn this to current and we'll stick on an AC current get it round one of these wires it's a bit shady it's not gonna work and theoretically this should give us well 24 milliamps okay that's good 24 million apps let's get back to the wrong position here so featuring my resplendent new to pound pound land calculator that's a point zero to 4 amps that 24 milliamps times this local supply voltage to guess at 240 and I could measure that right now I suppose I could just stuff the leads in there Cunha would give 5.76 watts but and because that the perfection all that the various drawing let's stop this until I have electrical connections so let's turn it back off and then turn it back on again let's zoom down and listen in order shove it right into that socket so the moment it's displaying 0.2 volts AC that's just a procuress to shove that down and try not to blow the power out to this flat a minute moment the 241 volts yes screw your European 230 volts it still is 240 volts so that was pretty accurate then and if I have measured the if that's the current that's flowing through the LEDs then theoretically if we just zoom back out again a little bit well.when incident this calculator just for those who are DK about such things one of the nicest things about it and this is particularly important with your measurings of electronic failures micro fires and stuff at that it's got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten digits that's really odd and even says GT grand total the end suburb a very odd calculator it looks like it's got a real sort of panel but I digress hold on the voltage across the LEDs was two hundred ten volts times if that RMS current equates to an RMS rectified 24 milliamps equals the five watts well there you go that's nice round figure so there we have it it looks okay oh this does this does leave one thing I should leave it on for a while and check the temperature one moment please oh it's just swamped Oh hold on a second right let's get that back down there oh no a bit flicker no this is no good this is why once you point directly at light sources but you can see the temperature over the surface of that bar though it's not the perfect surface to measure off let's even get the chip it's round about 60 degrees Celsius and average in that circuit board so M that's with the lid off and the ambient temperatures currently let's point at the bench 25 degrees is that 26 okay so typically say about 35 above ambient right one moment please right I shall review that footage and see if it's not too flickr innovates to flickering maybe I'll just rerecord this bit but I think it got the message across of the measure so that's it it does appear that a decent level of waterproofing is being done this they're both here and on the little cover in the back because it's little seal I wonder how well that will keep the water out not really much to go wrong and say deplete itself will get pretty hot an operation would immediately displace any moisture appeared on it but it's already got the protective coating in the sense of the sort of resistant this the black bits were an attempt to actually try and get sufferest to get a good thermal reading off but it wasn't that easy it needs needed a actual bit mature and that because the glossy surfaces aren't the best ones to actually measure off it should be a map surface but there we go the LD five watt bulkhead light which does appear to draw five watts and seems to work okay and comes a three-year warranty but whether they actually are no the warranty of whether of you know that people would go to the border for such a cheap light I think this was about five pounds or something like that and so the other thing that we really bothered if it failed although here's that situation again that with an augury bulkhead you take the cover off and you change the lamp and then you put the cover back on again with this one if it fails that's it filled and you have to change the whole fixture so in many ways the miracle LED revolution isn't such a miracle if people have to learn how to do electric walk themselves or employ electricians at gross inflated part p-type prices have to come in and change entirely fitting explained and led fails that's not very good but this is how it seems to be going a little tiny LED bulkhead fixture but that does seem to be quite well designed

Channel: undefined

Views: 112,621

Rating: 4.9291692 out of 5

Keywords: aldi, LED, bulkhead, light, 5W, cheap, DOB, waterproof, outdoor, schematic

Id: Bv0kdFyYEAU

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019