Working on my own DIY LED Strip lights, confused on my risks…my garden needs reliability and luckily I have some resources…there are ways to wire these to keep risk of hogging, etcetera low. I have been relegated to my area for months due to COVID, I plan to travel MUCH when this pandemic ends… Reliable, safe lighting is key…Bringing old school MH and HPS in as backup ( getting very affordable) but seeing people getting amazing results with LED. None of us can afford indoor fires, but especially those of us in repressive areas…hope people doing DIY strips use due dilligence, hope to be more comfortable with the newer tech soon…#OLDDOGNEWTRICKS…
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Amperage is what kills my man. High voltage isn’t without it’s perils as well as high voltage allows the current amperage to flow. So thinking a high amperage fixture is safe because of low voltage is insane at beat. It only takes .2 amp across the heart to stop it.
I’m any case however you choose to go remember to properly ground everything and use gfi if you can
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Im not wanting to get into a lesson on electricity as I am an electrician. Your information is correct but incomplete. It takes volts to push the amps through you. You can have a 10000000 amp supply that is 2 volts and those 10000000 amps are useless on a human because their internal resistance is so high. So the 2 volts cant push shit across that resistance. Now if you have a 200 volt supply that can push .01 amps max. You get someone to touch that and the 200 volts pushes the 0.01 amps through you and you die. Go and ground your frames. That will help protect you if a wire touches the frame and you then touch it while grounded if the current isn’t separated from the earth. If the drivers isolate the circuit then the power will be hot on both (+ -) and there will be no tendancy for the power to go to ground. You are probably only protecting yourself from driver failure if it is bolted to the frame. If an inexperienced user is wiring the setup and inadvertently touches the wrong cables while something is plugged in it is still good night.
I do not mean to be pushy and I would not be if this was on another topic. But you need to gain a better understanding of this subject before you go and advise people on what they are doing on things that can effortlessly kill them.
Go and get a driver that has a voltage output lower than what can kill you and sure, it will be a bit harder to wire and cost a little more but hey, you will still be around to smoke the product.
I am always speaking in relation to what is safest for the user, electrically, that is building, wiring, accessing and using the device. You are correct when you say that amperage can still be dangerous. It will still start fires etc. When you short it out against something with low resistance like metal then the amps will flow and the rest is history. You may burn to death in any case if you cant escape the building but you still wont be electrocuted by it if the voltage is low.
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Saying high amperage won’t hurt you is wrong as well. A fixture running 50A even at 24v will fuck you up. I always tell everyone to cover the solder spots on the strips and only strip 3/16 of an inch of using the push connectors. It definitely isn’t something to be played with either way. It’s probably best to treat any circuit like it will hurt you so you don’t get complacent and end up getting fried.
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Yeah stick your hands across a car battery at 12v which can provide up to 200A and you will feel it for sure. It is not going to kill you though. I could go on for days on this as you seem to still be schooling an electrician.
I am trying to help you here. Everyone can do whatever they want. It is up to them. I just would not want to be in your shoes when one day someone asks why John or Jane Doe isnt on the forum lately only to find out he or she electrocuted him or her self wiring up their light under the advisement of yours truly. I treasure life above everything else.
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So telling someone to make sure every exposed piece of metal in the circuit is covered is bad? Ok sure. You must not be able to read well, because I said to treat every circuit like it can kill you and you’re telling folks if it’s this you can touch it, to me telling anyone that isn’t an electrical engineer or certified electrician to touch any circuit is bad. Complacency kills, so if you get used to doing things and conditions change you’ll pay for it. Best advice for anything electrical is don’t touch the shiny parts unless you’ve verified twice it’s deenergized . The guy that rewired my house got flash burns from reaching in the panel with a screwdriver to get a piece of stray insulation like he’s done hundreds of times.
I am not telling anyone anything, you are. That is why I am suggesting you be careful… What I have said is in discussion with you about how electricity works and why it can be dangerous when advising inexperienced users. I am ending this discussion as it seems you are more concerned about having an argument than discuss this. This is my last reply.
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Ok, so now that you outed yourself as an electrician, I have a question.
If I ground the case and ensure my electrical supply is also grounded, that should protect a user for the most part as long as all the live connections are insulated? Any short to the case will be grounded through the outlet and not through the person, right?
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I am not willing to say for sure as I do not know how the drivers are configured/wired but in general yes. The grounding will protect you if the AC input up to the driver shorts out anywhere on the frame. The output from the driver may be isolated from the ground. So it may not have a potential to ground. So if for example the positive on the output of the driver touches the frame it will not be pulled to ground as it will have no potential to do so. Then if you touched the negative while touching the frame then it could be fatal. Not a lot of chance of that happening though. Again, I am making a lot of assumptions here so do not take my word for it. 
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This is more of a direct to mains DIY SIL hack I’m thinking, no isolated drivers involved. Just mains 120V.
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??? Do tell I am not familiar.
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I think @Mr.Sparkle wrote about it in either a few of his threads, or this thread, not sure.
Basically you pop open SIL LED bulbs and pull the chips out. I figure you can run a low profile array of SIL chips mounted to some kind of heat sink, ground it and then throw it in an isolated container and get a low profile 300W light for < $100 and some soldering/basic electrical work.
Combo serial and parallel wiring to manage voltage and current to make it safe and not get hot enough to set fire to things.
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Ground the electronics, GCFI, sounds good to me. What doesn’t is someone being potentially exposed to live mains reference. I would have to build an enclosure around it to feel safe leaving it. I’m no stranger to doing some stupid shit with electricity, but I’m not willing to risk anyone else’s safety. Always err on the side of caution with power like that.
What’s your array look like, power wise? I am curious about running something similar, but gave up on it and settled with strips.
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Enclosure. That’s the word I was looking for, but the weed stole it away.
I haven’t figured the specifics out, but I was envisaging 2 series circuits in parallel, each circuit 4 chips. That would simulate 2 4-fixture SIL hooked up to a power strip, and I’ve both built and run that set up before.
I think I can fit it all on a cheap cookie sheet that will double as a heat sink. All electrics wired with appropriate gauged insulated wire, liquid electrical tape applied at the solder points that can’t be heat shrinked.
Then for my purposes I’d mount that straight to wherever I need it, but for a more “general how to” guide I’d probably think about putting it in some kind of cheap tote.
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A grounded enclosure wouldn’t be the worst thing, but unless you can get one free its probably going to be cost prohibitive, unless you can form sheet metal yourself. Depending on the temp wood or acrylic may be options. They insulate rather than ground so kinda irrelevant if you’ve covered connections well.
So yeah, lots of help I am. Lol.
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Haha! Love bouncing ideas off people even if they don’t feel they have much to input at the time, cause you never know once you’ve planted that idea seed what they’ll think of.
I’m planning on grounding the cookie sheet just to double make sure, which is what my specific question was aimed toward.
I’d love to get my hands on a suitable metal enclosure but yeah, kinda hard and I have 0 experience or tooling to form sheet metal.
It was either a plastic tote, a custom wood box, or even a suitable Amazon box, like the one they send all the goodies you need to build the light in. There’s some poetry there that I like. But that would be dependent on temps and where the hot spots are. From what I remember they’re right on the base of the chip, but I’m also thinking of throwing in some cheap tiny computer case fans to get some air in the enclosure moving. That ups the price a little though.
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Food tins are an option! There, I got one in.
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All of the drivers I have looked at have floating outputs.
Looking at an HLG-320 Mean Well specifically, the “withstand voltages” are:
I/P - O/P : 3.75KVAC
I/P - FG : 2KVAC
O/P - FG : 1.5KVAC
Those numbers should be rather typical. That said, extending a frame ground to the fixture should be OK (a good thing if it gives you piece of mind).
Cheers
G
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Was gonna stay out of it but thats incorrect to say so and dangerous, say it was a humid hot day and you were sweating, that drops your resistance alot or say were shirt less in same conditions and were reaching into and engine bay and made contact of both terminals to your chest thats not gonna be a fun experience potentially even lethal, also high amperage circuits say you have a loose connection at some point to a point where an arc may form or a direct short guess what would happen to that at your 10mil amps, flaming plasma ball of death.
Also to counter if “all high voltage” is instantly deadly in a satirical way then how has the human race survived from all those deaths from static electric discharge which can be upwards of 20-30000 volts, party ballons, wool socks and carpet would be feared and banned by every country in the world if that was the case
Fact of the matter is its the total amount of energy in a given situation thats the issue, whether its high voltage or high amperage thats only one part of it as both voltage and current work hand in hand with each other as voltage is the ability or difference to to do the work and current is the rate at which it is done but other things such as duration, resistance, frequency, whats the grounding source, how a circuit fails, to even atmospheric conditions all comes into play.
Safety is required regardless.
Heck if you want to get into it more Wikipedia has a base covering of it.
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only reason i broke apart the bulbs in that situation was really to conserve on fixture height, if you have the height taking off the domes is really only all i would do as its just an improvement by making the light more directional. Also in the situation where i was running multiple chips of one or two of the drivers it was just a way at the time to use more point sources of light at the same wattages, plus one of the drivers was dead.
honestly depending on the situation pickign up a couple of the small 280mm bridgelux strips would cover most “micro” situations and is 50% more efficent than sils, obviously that wont work in the super small stuff and thats where you can be creative and use them if need be or already have them on hand.
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