The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps

this video is about a very special type of phillips lamp and i have to thank andy for sending these to me he was working over the the in dubai and he brought them back with him and that's the thing unless you live in dubai you can't buy these lamps they're not available anywhere else because philips doesn't really want them available anywhere else they'd much rather you have this one instead so the story behind these well let me let me get into the technology first and then we'll we'll talk about the story so here is a typical four watt led filament lamp and here's a typical two one two hot one and generally speaking these filaments are rated one watts each which is disappointing because this phillips lamp is running about 1.5 watts each and it does say that it's got a lifespan of 15 years or 15 000 hours well i very much doubt it's going to get 15 000 hours or 15 years unless you just never take it out the packet because it will be grilling the leds so the way these achieve that super high efficiency this one gets 100 lumens of watt these ones get 200 lumens of water the way they achieve that is by under running the leds so whereas well let's compare here's a two watt one and it has one two three four five six seven eight filaments here's a classic two watt lamp it's only got two so instead of running these filaments at one watt to run in that quarter watt let me show you this one lit let me bring up the hoppy this is a good thing to do i've had so many false stars in this video it's it's actually it's got it's a complicated story these lamps are intriguing but they have an interesting history behind them and well i'll let you judge for yourself so i screw this in it's cold white this is a fairly standard thing i'm pretty off short for two watts that's actually really bright uh it says 2.2 watts current is uh 18 milliamps and power factor is 0.5 which is fairly typical for a lamp like this i was kind of hoping for better power factor but it is not to be uh let's bring another lamp in let's bring in the rather splendid three bot lamp and they're still working that basis four times as many filaments so this time you've got 12 led filaments in one lamp which is ridiculous i screw it in it lights up cold white again there is a reason for that a 3.6 watch roughly per factor 0.5 current of 28 milliamps let's say for completeness let's plug in the little dinky one the one watt lamp if i can find my one watt lamp holder here is the one watt lamp should i say the bait cat lamp holder here's a lamp this one is a warm white warm ish white everything's biased towards low temperatures i should say high color temperatures colder whites so plug this one in and it lights nice and brightly for one watt it's exceptional for one more at 1.15 watts at 9 milliamps and about say 0.5 power factor again so they're all 0.5 power factor roughly okay that's reasonable enough so this was a a joint venture between phillips and his highness sheikh mohammed bin rashid al maktoum the ruler of dubai i've probably pronounced that wrong my apologies if i have feel free to correct me with the pronunciation down below in the in the comments and he requested a partnership which resulted in five-year exclusive deal for philips to supply the dubai lamp and they have achieved that efficiency they've achieved the doubling of efficiency purely by under running the leds that doesn't just result in them running a lot cooler it operates them in the more efficient zone because the harder you push an led the less efficient it gets and it also means that the circuitry because it only goes up to three watts that's the highest power of dubai lamp you can get one two and three watts because of that the base runs cool as well so you've got cool running leds cool running electronics they're going to last a very very long time as well as giving that high efficiency so there are only eight leds in the range you have the one watt led you have the two more led you have the three watt led and you have an mr16 style one which i do not have which is rated three watts and operates at 12 volts they do not notably do a gu10 one and this is sensible because one of the biggest problems with the the gu10 led lamps they have a very high failure rate because the circuitry is inside the base and it runs the leds at the typically they try to aim for five watts nine watts they over they absolutely grill these the leds get hot the circuitry gets hot they fail very quickly by minimizing the amount of circuitry in these by using a 12-volt supply an mr16 lamp rated just three watts it's going to result in a long life so four lamps the one two three and the mr16 plus the same in warm white that's what you've got cold white and warm white and this has pissed the architects off completely royally because uh it's not it means that they can't specify lamps like this for installation because they've been told you have to use these lamps so they can't use this big ikea globe lamp and they can't perhaps have the designer vintage lamp which is also quite popular these nice long filaments and they can't i presume they can't have the sort of decorative lamps like this that use discrete leds inside which is a shame so they're a bit miffed about this also the fact that the color rendering index is apparently 80 which is okay that means that uh forgiven for a range of colors uh say for instance looking at this packaging if you were looking at this packaging it was illuminated by really low color rendering index uh lights it would look very bland it would look very grayish but by the better color entry index with tungsten being the the pinnacle for that really it's got a broad spectrum it gives it all the rich colors and every color shows in the spectrum but this has probably not got quite a completely perfect spectrum so the architects are miffed uh where can we go with this so the cost of these is between three pounds sixty to six pounds sixty that equates to somewhere between five dollars and nine dollars each lamp which is fairly expensive but this lamp this three watt lamp keep in mind it's putting out twice as much as this lamp the phosphors and the leds are going to degrade really quickly in that lamp that lamp is not going to last anywhere near as long as this one so it's actually still a good deal the two colors the warm white and the cold white it's actually the warm way is worm-ish white the cool they call these uh they call this one warm white but to most people it would be on the sort of cooler end of warm white they call this one cool daylight and it is the most popular lamp because dubai being a very hot country they prefer the cooler color temperature you know the colder white because it just makes it it gives a cooler ambience whereas in canada or scotland or other places with a low temperature we tend to prefer um warm white led lamps because they just give that nice rich warm glow it's just it's a psychological thing i'll put the lamp out the way it is it is not relevant to this so what's the circuitry like inside these then is there anything i need to say here other than this i think that is more or less that i've covered the history of these it's a five-year deal incidentally and by the end of it uh phillips expect to have sold 10 million lamps i think it's a bit of a closed shop i don't know if other manufacturers are allowed to make these yet uh it'll be interesting what happens it's time to open a base and see what's inside so i'm going to choose the biggest i'm going to choose the the three watt one and i'm going to nip into the base like this try not to burst the lamp and fill my hand with glass in the process i'm going to nibble at the base as i've done the past i may even use the pointer snips here that probably aren't really best suited to the job but they get abused a lot and they're cheap so it doesn't really matter and what i'm expecting to find in here well i don't know is it going to be a capacitive dropper i don't think so although that is not a great power factor is it perhaps going to be a little current regulating component you know the one that will that will be current regulating but is it going to be the type that is a linear regulator i see a little i see a little sub basin here bear with me here uh if i this is going to take too long it shouldn't take too long i shall pause so i don't torch you with my shenanigans here of tearing into this it's a very typical construction but you would expect that it is phillips they're quite good at making light bulbs i say that philips is just a big corporate entity now it's not what it used to be oh that whole module's coming out well that's quite interesting that's what i want is it going to be a switching regulator is it going to be let's cut that let's cut that there pulled that back off i'm seeing some capacitors i'm seeing lots of capacitors is this a voltage multiplier how have they got the leds configured oh they've got a few connections going up to that this is very intriguing could this be a voltage multiplier and also maybe a capacitive drop or is there some switching regulation going on how intriguing i shall proceed with caution here because i don't want to destroy the evidence if you will let's see if we can remove as much of this metal as possible i thought there was a little plastic cup in there but really it's uh just heat shrink around the electronics which is good i see electrolytic capacitors which uh well that's going to be one weakness because having said that this isn't running hot so they're not going to be abused like in some of the other light fittings in previous videos i have taken other lamps apart and i've modified them so they run at lower power a good example of that so this is the connection so this is one of the feeds from the side coming on to this we've got two connections going up here it's going up through these leds down through those leds joining together up and down again so they have four sets of filaments in series this is almost certainly going to be a i think it's going to be a voltage multiplier i think it's going to operate them at quite high voltage that's intriguing you know what i think we should find that out with a meter i see a bridge rectifier in the bottom as you would expect right tell you what i'm going to take some pitch this i'm going to do a bit of reverse engineering or see secretary as well including a weird little component i think we need to investigate this further one moment please just before i take a photo and reverse engineer this i've worked out the polarity i've connected to meter i've set it to a thousand volts because i think it's a fairly high voltage across these filaments but don't know want to check that out let's do the test the voltage across the filaments is 227 volts okay that's useful to know and now i'm going to disconnect this i'm going to watch the voltage gradually going down very slowly there so that makes mental note circuit board contains spicy voltages okay right here i'll be back in a moment some considerable time later the reverse engineering is done and it's a very very odd circuit very strange indeed it seems to have like duplicates of everything i don't know if this is just to keep it small by using too small say for instance these two capacitors here are effectively in parallel maybe that's just for a size or maybe it's just for reliability that they're just providing duplicates and likewise this capacitor and this capacitor they're both effectively in parallel along with these ones it's very strange i'll show you the schematic in a moment but it's basically it's a capacitive dropper but with a bit of active circuitry you can see a transistor here you can see a transistor here to actually work out this transistor was i initially thought it was an npn transistor i ended up having to desolder it from the circuit board uh put it on a tester and then actually sold it back onto the circuit board because i want to put this back together again test something afterwards that means soldering all those components on as well the only way i could reverse engineer properly was to actually all the the capacitors and the inrush limiting resistor but things worthy of note before we get to the schematic there are four capacitors in parallel two uh 330 nano farad ones one across here one across here and then these two presumably 25 nano farad because the total when i removed those ones was 50 nano farad but um we'll talk about those when i look at the schematic there is a bridge rectifier that's reasonable enough um smoothing capacitors that's reasonable enough the interest limiting resistor here and then there's a smattering of other components that effectively make up a little bit of extra current regulation now the lamp itself i have counted number of filaments you'll see it is flickering merrily away here because i've improvised a temporary power supply to run at very low current the leds are all running at 20 microamps each at the moment uh it's two 470k resistors and a bridge wrecked for an output i can touch that because there's resistors between that in the means but uh it's running it at low current and that let me get close up the magnifying glass and actually count the number of led chips and see roughly what shape they were there are 21 chips in each filament giving a combined total voltage of about uh it comes in hold on let me just work this out 21 chips times and at full current it's about 2.7 about 56 volts per filament but when you're running them at lower current it drops way down it actually drops down to just over 40 volts but at super micro low current but that let me count them and also the shape of the chip suggests they're what are called flip chip which makes sense a flip chip is basically it's an led but well if this was the three watt uvc ballast if this was the led instead of actually mounting it onto the substrate and then actually having say bond pads onto then jumping wires onto off the actual circuit board itself what it does is they actually carry those through to the bottom so that effectively it just mounts directly down to either glues or sodas directly onto the substrate and that's what makes a connection so what you're seeing under there are just the bare chips there are no little gold bond wires it makes it very easy for manufacturer also takes a lot of stress off the chip during manufactured gas and makes it more reliable certainly looking at these i can see two at that super low current to very slightly dimmer chips but other than that they're pretty well matched in that let's take a look at the schematic oh one other thing before i put this out the way this aluminium rim is attached to this before the main base is attached so what they do is they either solder or just tuck the wire through that's going to make connection they smear some glue around actually you know what i'm just seeing the wire just lead across that so they've this has got a coarse thread in it so when they actually terminate this it lets them put all the electronics on easily and just lay the wire over the edge poke the uh wire that's going from the resistor that's going through to the base cap the end cap let me just grab an end cap this bit here that the little rivet rivet pushes in and what that means is they can then just screw on the cap and that pinches that wire against the side glues it in place and then they just cut the wire and put the little crimp in its just to make it easier to manufacture all very interesting right tell you what the schematic the schematic is very interesting i shall zoom down in this and then we shall explore it you may see a modification has been made because before i took that transistor off to test it i was trying to measure in circuit and because of other things in the circuit including these zener diodes the low value resistors and other transistors it made this look like an npn transistor when it really isn't it is actually a mosfet so the incoming supply live and neutral goes via the 10 ohm resistor the 10 ohm resistor limits the inrush current and also acts as a fuse it also completely defeats the r1r2 electrical installation test but let's not talk about that that's a controversial area that i'll cover in a video later on uh an electrical test in the uk that is actually just out of date to the point of being a bit silly now we then have four capacitors yes the capacitor missile we have four capacitors in parallel we have two 330 nanofar 250 volt ones now you think the 250 volt seems quite low for something that's operating with a peak voltage theoretically about 350 volts but in reality there's such a drop across the um leds that the voltage that is being dropped across the capacitors is quite low at the end initially when it's charging up these uh capacitors here that could be a bit higher but that 10 ohm resistor will once again actually act as a limiting factor there for the voltage across them then there's the bridge rectifier and then there's two capacitors in parallel two 4.7 microfarad 350 volt again they're only going to go up to about 200 or so volts across this circuit then at this point a cheap lamp would just have stuck the leds more or less straight across that maybe with the resistor and series but in this case they have a fairly complex bit of circuitry they have a linear current regulator so we have some resistors feeding the gate of this mosfet the mosfet turns on current flows through the leds and as the current increases the voltage across these two cent resistors 31 ohms total to 62 ohms in parallel rises up as soon as it reaches about 0.6 volts it turns on this transistor which then starts shunting the gate of the mosfet and therefore it more or less keeps the voltage across these resistors at 0.6 volts which acts as basically a simple current regulator and it's not going to have a huge range because there are two parallel um xenodiodes let me show you this in our diodes these two zener diodes are apparently 12 volts and they are in parallel with that so if it ever exceeds this circuitry or if the circuitry ever fails these will kick in and it will just drop that 12 volts across the zeners now a couple of things to note i think the reason it's got the linear current regulation is because of simple capacitive uh limiter lamps you can sometimes get an effect where if the mains voltage fluctuates up a bit up and down a bit because these voltage the voltage of the leds is very close to the mains voltage um it causes a slight visible intensity ripple i reckon that this simple linear regulator is to compensate for that it is effectively if you've seen those super simple led circuit boards with basically what looks like a little eight pin chip or a big transistor and it actually actively regulates the current directly it means voltage that's what this is doing but because it's an operator in the very small range they've done it with discrete components a lot cheaper also it doesn't have thermal feedback it doesn't need it because if anything goes wrong if the voltage across it was too high um these zener diodes will conduct and besides the dissipation from the circuit is really low anyway because it's designed to be a really low power lamp the resistor's feeding the i initially thought this was a standard npn transistor so i wondered why they had this resistor here because theoretically that would cap the voltage on its gate to its base should say to about 0.6 volts but these were an unusually high value that's what made me suspect this and also there was a resistor down here which seemed to almost be to cap the voltage going up too high and what turns out to be the gate of that mosfet which makes sense so that's why they've got this uh resistor down here but it has another function this combined chain of resistors means that any slight leakage you get you know that thing when you've got two-way switching and you turn the lights off and the led one just sits there at microamps and glows visibly in the background if i was to actually take the exposure off this if i turn light off that would stop flickering going to do that ready exposure off yeah see that that is running at 60 microamps total 20 microamps through the leds would you want me to give you a power range for that right tell you what hold on uh i'm about to turn the lights back on just watch your eyes so i shall just lock that off again so the main supply let's just do it full losses and everything 240 volts rms times point zero zero zero zero six it's that lamp is running at just over a tenth of a watt no it's running a hundredth of a watt that's ridiculous that is so ridiculous that it's visibly you know it actually casts a good decent amount of light at that current that is the whole point of this super efficient leds under running them uh they put out a lot more light more efficiently they run at lower voltage they run at lower heat it's just the most efficient way to run the leds but that's about it now what i want to know i want to put that circuit board back together again and i want to tap off a couple of wires across here and see what voltage is being dropped across here because it must be operating somewhere between 0 and 12 volts to avoid these zener diodes coming into action so i'm going to do that right now so i'm going to get these components i'm going to solder them back on i'm going to hook the lamp back up to it i'm going to hook a couple of mains leads and then a couple of test leads and we'll measure the voltage across that i shall be back in one moment and i'm back it is sorted back together i've added extra wires on across let me show you where i've connected those in the circuit i've not tested this yet by the way so there is a possibility things may go horribly wrong um i've connected the lead across effectively from the negative end of the diodes to the capacitor negative here so it's basically across these zener diodes if it measures 12 volts or above then the zener diodes are doing a bit if it's less than 12 volts i think it will be then the uh the active circuitry will be regulating within that area and it'll be interesting to see what it is one other thing it's worth mentioning here this zero ohm link marked r2 i'm not 100 sure what that's for but i can tell you where it is it's actually in here so my guess is that it was an attempt at adding the possibility of just a little bit of extra regulation between these two capacitors by adding a resistor there it would have dropped the voltage slightly and also prevented it would have actually reduced the ripple um on the leds not there is much ripple in the leds from the original lamp it is very good this classy there's someone who knows their stuff has designed this lamp anyway let's connect this to the quick test and i i do feel the need to warn you that i have not tested this it may go bang just in case you need fresh underpants on hand for when i connect this up let's set this to 20 volts and see if it goes bang and it's it's lit and it's hovering at 4 volts that is so nicely tuned as leds are heating up that is a that is very interesting that is very very interesting that they've pretty much got it dead center on that six volts uh based on the current being dropped across those so what's actually happening here is that uh the bulk of the i'll just make sure i don't stick my fingers in all the live bits there the bulk of the current is being dropped across the capacitive droppers but there is a voltage of the voltage of the leds plus that margin across these capacitors basically the the current flowing through the leds is balancing with the capacitive reactants and it gives us a lower voltage in that rail which will be uh hold on i'll shouldn't tell you what it is oh this is where i this is where i do come a cropper trying to measure things with the power on right say what so let's set this to a thousand volts and we shall probe oh this is going to end so badly this is going to end so badly so the leds are connected across positive this is the negative going to the bottom circuit 232 volts across those capacitors and across the leds it's just a bit less because it's that bit that's being dropped across the 226 roughly being dropped across the leds with that tiny little extra bit and it is hovering up and down it will depend on is there anything else i can turn on locally hold on i'm not going to see this i'm going to go and turn on the kettle so and see if the voltage fluctuation in the house is compensated for with this uh so 7.3 volts i'll just go and do that right now 7.3 it has it's compensated the voltage is dropped and it's regulating the current that is amazing so that would effectively have stopped that slight undulation of intensity leds that's very neat and so that is it now there's one other thing i want to say under running leds is good a long time ago uh four and a half years ago i made a video where i deliberately hacked uh as opposed to accidentally hacked some poundland lamps they were selling five watt lamps i've got one here the cover is off for a reason uh it actually looked nicer through even though it's live it looked nicer through the crystals of the chandelier uh that it's in the chandelier the plastic chandelier in my porch but this lamp you'll see a little bit of ripple because it is just a simple capacitive dropper this lamp i modified it to be half watt because they originally supplied them at five watt and three watt versions but the only difference was the capacitor inside was different and if the the five watt ones absolutely grilled the leds the three watt ones would last a long time i adapted this one to half watt it has been running now for about 50 000 hours there's no point even switching off i just leave it on 24 7. 50 thousand hours at half a watt for about uh a power uh a total power consumption usage a total cost of electricity keep in mind four and a half years fifty thousand hours at about half a watt 24 7 it's cost less than four pounds to run and this thing looks just as bright as it was then i mean it's obviously not mega bright let me turn the let me turn the exposure off and turn this off and you'll see it just washes the place of light it's perfectly acceptable it illuminates the porch but not excessively brightly so that's what happens when you under run leds the increase in efficiency they last a lot longer and it just basically takes stress off all the components in the lamp the light is coming back watch your eyes so that's more or less it the the lamps the dubai lamps are absolutely fascinating they're a really interesting design they're it's worth mentioning that the fact that the circuitry is based in a capacitive dropper means that rather they're not sure this is this is going to also displease the architects greatly um as the box alludes as soon as i saw the circuitry worked out what it was i said that's not dimple that is not dimmable these lamps are not dimmable so if the architects want intensity control they're going to have to have multi-circuit chandeliers or lights that they can switch in sections of light or they're going to have to go i guess they're probably allowed things like led strip and stuff like that is an alternative but there we go fascinating lamps it's a shame they're not available in other parts of the world but i guess maybe it's just the fact that maybe they're too good maybe they're going to last too long and that's why they don't really want to make them available elsewhere and also the cost keep in mind that say this is a a three watt lamp and this is a four watt lamp um and this one effectively has three times as many filaments four filaments per watt which is a that's the equivalent this would make this a one watt lamp uh and that's just increases the manufacturing cost although having said that with the uh flip chip assembly these are totally machine manufacturable there's no need for uh people to be using the little light in the in the early days you all the leds were connected the wire bonds the flip chips has changed that completely it's very much an automated process now but there we go my favorite style of led lamp the led filament lamp has just reached its pinnacle with the dubai lamp by philips as i say shame they're not available over here even at a slight extra cost premium

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 2,364,536

Rating: 4.8917923 out of 5

Keywords: philips, led, dubai, lamp, circuitry, schematic, high, efficiency, rare, long, life

Id: klaJqofCsu4

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/haladura]

So the wisdom here is 'run LEDS underpowered to decrease heating and improve efficiency.' Yes?

[u/EternalGandhi]

TL;DW???

[u/SleeplessInS]

I actually am.subscribed to this Youtuber for a long time now, ever since he did the flaming doll gag video...he lives on a little island off the coast of the UK and hacks into the interior bits of weird electronic devices, very cool guy. He also has a series on trying various liquids in his sodastream.

[u/coba1t]

i too got this recommended to me on youtube and yes i watched it. youtube is our overlord

[u/Summebride]

I miss karma dec-at that would bust the sleazy reposting of these videosevery few days.

[u/haladura]

All of a sudden I need to have these bulbs.

[u/splendidfd]

Less than a week ago

[u/Ixilary]

And people say planned obsolescence doesn't exist in the real world. Well, you're looking at an example right here. The bulbs designed for the rest of the world are not meant to last. They are meant to fail at the right™ time.

When profit is the motive, of course companies want their products to fail. Not too quickly, you don't want to arouse too much suspicion, but quick enough to extract some extra cash from consumers. In the end, the result is that most of the products sold in our society are absolutely trash in terms of quality, because that's what sells, and that's what artificially raises the GDP even though it's quite damaging to society. They aren't trash just because of cheap parts, no, they're trash because they're designed to be trash. And this applies to almost every durable good money can buy.

And even when it's not maliciously planned, the companies with short-lasting products will often take the lead in the economy due to repeat customers (again, assuming the quality isn't too shit), even if it's accidental. So over time, the quality of everything you buy just keeps decreasing while the quality businesses declare bankruptcy.

[u/Jorge_Palindrome]

Not as good as Dubai Porta-Potties.