someone explain1w vs 5w...pros and cons

I have been searching and am trying to determine the values of a 1w light vs the 5w.Can someone explain to me the way watts work and what is the advantage or dis-advantage of a 5w light.What determines watts?Is it the battery that pushes out the watts or does the LED pull it out.I know watts and voltage are different but how are they related?Basically I would like someone with a lot more sense than myself to explain what is it that makes some lights brighter than others.Is it watts or volts or the LED itself.It would be much easier for me to decide on future purchases if I could just grasp the basics concepts of this rapidly growing addiction I am developing.I know I just got here and ask a lot of questions but I got to start somewhere....thanks for any help

The Watt is a measure of POWER.
The relation to Volts is....Watts = Volts x Amps

If yhou look into a 5W led you will see 4 grids which is actually 4 1.25W LEDs on one platform. So... a 5W LED should be about 4x brighter than a !W(1.25W) LED.

Put simply,,, use a 1 or 3 Watt for tight beams that throw more.
Use a 5W for more overall light output, with more of a flood beam, with more spill light.

The 4 die patern of the 5W makes it harder for the reflector or optic to focus. Sence it is actually 4 focal points, even though they are very close together, it still makes it so they can be focused as much as the 1 and 3W leds.

What makes lights brighter than others: hmmm
I would say the 3 most important things are: LED effeciency, mA the LED is driven at, and the optic or reflector used. (in that order)

A good BIN led can make all the differece. Driving a much less effeciant led at very high mA will just make it run hotter, with even LESS efficiency.

The mA (milli Amps) that are sent to the led is basically how hard the led is being driven. 1W leds are rated at 350mA, but all of us drive them harder. Some as high as 1,5 amps!!! But, for the most part, you dont want to go above 700mA. Any more than that will run the led too hot, and you wont get much more light output for the loss in runtime.
3W leds are rated at 750mA. They are basically 1W leds that can take more mA and handle the heat generated by that easier.
5W leds are rated at 750mA also. Many people like to direct drive these. (no converter, regulator, or resistors) This can lead to as much as 1.6 amps going to the led. This is BRIGHT, but you MUST have VERY good heat sinking to do this.

You should always heat sink an led as well as possible, the cooler the led is, the more effecient it is.
If you are driving an led at under 200mA, you dont have to heat sink it. But, it wont hurt to do it anyway.

Well, very simply, Luxeon sell 1 watt and 5 watt parts. The Wattage is determined by Current x Voltage. The volatge between luxeons varies from LED to LED, so the 1 watt and 5 watt names are not strictly 100% accurate, but close enough. The current is specified by lumileds, 350mAh for the 1 watters and 700 for the 5 watters. This (the current) is the bit that modders and manufacturers play around with to increase/decrease the brightness, as over-volting often leads to burnt LEDs, noxious fumes and tears before bedtime.
Also, the brightness will vary from LED to LED, with some giving more total light output when fed the same amount of electricity than another LED from the same batch (do a search for "luxeon lottory" for a stack more information on this).
The 5 watt LED is essentially 4 1 watters crammed into the same package as the regular 1 watt part. This means a lot more light, and also a lot more heat. The light from a 5 watter is emitted from a larger surface area than a 1 watter, so can be harder to concentrate into a tight beam of light. They make a fantastic floodlight, but need bigger optics or wider reflectors to focus into a tight beam.

Oops, sorry, kakster is correct.
5W leds are rated at 700mA, not 750mA. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ohgeez.gif

For more information on BIN Codes go here:
http://home.comcast.net/~theledguy/bin_codes/index.htm

Let me see if I can explain how I am understanding this.Lets say I have two funnels and one is a large one and the other funnel is small.These funnels represent my LED.Now I place both funnels on a gallon of water and turn upside down.Obviously the smaller funnel is going to drain slower and the larger funnel will go faster with a wider stream of water.Is this basically the same as 1w vs 5w?So the power supply has nothing to do with the watts?I did not know anything about the mah readings on batteries until reading several threads here but this is also a mystery to me.I now see why the solitaire mod was not as bright as I thought.See I thought that with a 12 volt battery it would be bright as most single LED lights run off of under 4 volts and this was way more than four.Now I know that the 12 volt battery has a very low mah rating and this is what an LED needs more than volts to be bright.is that correct?

AH, this is often misunderstood.

mAh= milli Amp Hours. Or the amount of stored energy inside a battery. The more mAh the longer the battery will supply power.

mA= milli Amps. This is the strength of the energy. It has nothing to do directly with mAh.

Think of mAh as the amount of water comming out of a hose.
Think of mA as how hard (the pressure) the water is comming out of that hose.

A low mAh battery will make a led shine pretty much the same brightness, just not for as long.

As far as you funnel analogy, that makes sence to me.

Quote: "I know that the 12 volt battery has a very low mah rating and this is what an LED needs more than volts to be bright.is that correct? "

No, that is mA. Not mAh.

But, as I stated before, a better BIN led will be the key. A good BINNED led driven at spec mA will sometimes be a good bit brighter than a lower quality BINNED led driven at higher mA.

So with a 1w you get less run time than A 5W using the same power supply?I was trying to understand what is going on inside a battery concerning watts.If I understand correct a 2 cell 123 light can produce either 1w or 5w depending on the LED?A 5w LED simply pulls more power faster from a battery than a 1w?
Also I have heard of 3w LED and wonder if there are 2w and 4w?I am beginning to grasp the concept and I thank all of you for your help and patience with a newbie

Your questions are great, like this one: "Is it the battery that pushes out the watts or does the LED pull it out."

The hose analogy is good. I will change it to "hole" here. let me expand it a bit.

Ampere is like gallons per second.

it is important also to notice that for a given hole diameter, the height of your barrel is determining the amount of flow through the hole, because a high barrel has more pressure in the bottom. A shallow and wide barrel will be emptied slowly.

The pressure represents volts.


These Light Emitting Diodes are a bit special holes. there are over pressure valves on them, so that when the voltage is too low, there is almost no leakage through them. when the voltage is high enough, they suddenly open.

bringing it to electronics again, a 1w or 3w (almost the same thing) gives very little light when the volt is below say 3 (this number varies a bit). then the light increases very rapidly along with current (the valve has opened) and heat. Does it make any sense?

If you made two holes, and put two valves on each hole, you would have a 5w luxeon. You would need twice as much pressure (volts) to open the valves, and since there is two holes, twice as much current can flow without anything busting.

Efficiency is a measure of how much of the energy becomes light and how much is wasted as heat.

I think Roy and AliSnail came the closest to my understanding. Let me take a crack at this, in terms that I understand. Maybe between several people's examples, one will make sense for you.

If we are going to stick to pipe examples...

Voltage (volts) is the water pressure in a pipe.
Current (amps) is the volume of water coming out of the pipe.
Power (watts) is a conbination of pressure and volume

so..

10 volts at 1 amp equals 10 watts
2 volts at 5 amps equals 10 watts
2000 volts at 0.05 amps equals 10 watts

All those are the same power.

Now to lights. Brightness does not mean volume of light.

For example,

A laser pointer may have a million candlepower (brightness)
A handheld spotlight may also a million candlepower (again same brightness)

But which of these would be better to flood a street with light?

The difference is "power" "lumens" the spotlight puts out brightness AND lots of lumens. The laser pointer could be brighter, but doesn't have the Power because it doesn't have the quantity of light (lumens)

A 5 watt Luxeon produces four times as much light as a 1 watt (actually 1.25) Luxeon everything else being equal. That does not neccessarily mean it is four times brighter or intense.

GregR

I think I understand the concept and am beginning to understand that a lower voltage does not always equal dimmer output.I am not even attempting to understand how an LED works just trying to learn what is the best combinations to power these marvels.It all began when my buddy purchased a KL4 after using his KL1 for months.The difference was incredible.I love the KL4 as it really lights up the entire room.He uses it with one 123 cell and sometimes uses it with 2 123 cells.So it works both with 6 volts and with only 3.I am assuming that the 5w head does not care what voltage it uses as it is incredibly bright with either set up.I know that this is a quality head unit and that that also helps with output but I could not figure out how it functioned with 3 or 6 volts.I am in the beginning stages of playing around with various lights and I was once a fan of long throw rechargeables due to my police work.I now am beginning to love the LED lights as it seems the lights are always improving and will be the future of lighting.I enjoy the members on here who make these incredible customs.I have a head full of ideas just no knowlege to put them to use.That will all change if I continue to associate with you fellow flashaholics.Thanks again and I am sure there will be more questions to follow.....

The difference is wow /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif and WOW! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/whoopin.gif

Unfortunately, I dont think any one metaphor is going to explain the relationship between watts, volts, runtime and light output.

It's sort of like speed, distance and gas milage: they're related, but no one explanation is going to make sense without getting goofy.

My take:
Watts are power.
More power means more light and shorter run times.

Robocop,

Why can the KL4 be bright with both 3 and 6 Volts?
Becuase, it has a circuit board in it that regulates the power going to the led. It can take the 3V and boost it. It will try to send the same amount of power to the led no matter what voltage it is fed. (within limits)

The best thing about these convertor boards is, they give the light a "flat" light output curve. Meaning, they dont dim over time as much as incan lights. They will hold a fairly constant level of light throughout the battery life,,, then at the end, drop off in output steaply.
I LOVE this feature, cuz I always end up changing incan lights batts after about 40% of batt life is gone, therefor, not using all the batteries power.

Robocop-

Think of batteries as a gas tank. More batteries longer runtime.

Batteries can vary in the amount of power they can hold, lithiums alot, alkalines not as much. Kinda like diesel v. gasoline. You can go alot further on 10 gallons of diesel than 10 gallons of gasoline

These metaphors are not exactly correct, but should help, until your next set of questions. it's obvious to me your getting more and more into this whole flashaholic thing.


GregR

Amps is like the amount of electrons.
Volts is how fast they are moving through something. Increase the volts to your LED, more amps/current/eletrons will go through it. So if you put 4.5 volts from 3 D batteries to LuxeonIII, your running more volts than it's designed for and will overdrive it and push more current into it.

Boost circuits will boost voltage so that you can power the LED if you have too few of batteries to meet the voltage requirements of the LED. But to do this they suck more current from the batteries than if they were just powering the LED by themselves. About the best effeciency of converters is 80%. So it's also best to have the voltage of the batteries as close to the voltage required by the LED, or the boost circuit will have to draw a lot more current to boost the voltage than if it only had to boost it up a couple .1's of a volt.

.

"Is it the battery that pushes out the watts or does the LED pull it out."

I am tempted to say they move of their own volition.
Nevertheless if there is a path, they will try to get from where there is more of them (negative pole) to where there is less (positive pole). Kind of, at least. The atoms in the negative pole of the battery has more electrons swirling around them than they "need" to be balanced. Or something like that. When trying to stop them you can harvest energy from them. The energy in a bulb or LED comes out as heat and light.

Small size of the lightsource (bulb filament or led die) and large reflectors allows for more parallell beams from the reflector, thus more throw. That's how a 1w can rival a 5w in throw, even if the 5w gives more light overall.