LED Floodlight

I have been asked what it would take to build a LED based floodlight that is comparable to a 500W Halogen work light. Just going from bare emitters, I looked up some specs on a 500W halogen. The bare tube is putting out in the area of 10,000 lumens. It looks to me like the best an LED can do with a reasonable drive is about 100. Building an array of 100 Cree emitters to get the same flux is probably not practical.

The light would be used exactly as a work light would be - large area lighting. So it pretty much has to be flood.

Ideas? The system needs to be rugged. I suspect at these outputs, HID is a better idea in terms of efficiency. But that's more expensive than LEDs and hugely more expensive that a simple halogen lamp.

There's no way an HID is beating the 100lm/W from LEDs driven at 350mA. You could set up 3 Xitanium 1750 drivers each running 30 Cree Q5s (like on the Xitanium datasheet) for 10k lumens.

From DX, 90 Q5s on 16mm round bases (or stars) and 3 Xitanium drivers from LEDSupply comes to a little under $800. It will draw about 150W from the wall.

The LEDs could be mounted to a heatsink about 18*21cm in size.

So yuk - price is ridiculous. Maybe not for one of us, but for someone trying to sell this thing to the general public who can buy a 500W flood from WalMart for about $20.

Oh well, I knew that was the answer - I just needed a sanity check. Thanks!

MikeLip said:

So yuk - price is ridiculous. Maybe not for one of us, but for someone trying to sell this thing to the general public who can buy a 500W flood from WalMart for about $20.

Oh well, I knew that was the answer - I just needed a sanity check. Thanks!

Click to expand...

:laughing:

Don't you hate it when reality rears it's ugly head?

you would need only 50 leds at 1amp but its still silly money

i made a 10cree array on a heatsink fitted to an old camera tripod
cost me about £40 ($80) including 12ah 12v battery

it uses about 45w but gives miles more light than the 100w halogen it replaced - best of all battery life is better and its more durable

i use it for skateboarding at night - lighting up an area so tricks can be filmed

but it works equally as well as a work light or in the garden at night

Alex

datiLED said:

:laughing:

Don't you hate it when reality rears it's ugly head?

Click to expand...

Reality sucks -I much prefer the world inside my head!