On 07/03/2021 07:59, Terry Coles wrote:
On Saturday, 6 March 2021 23:17:06 GMT Tim wrote:
Its two lights and two power supplys (of which one power supply is
dead), both light work already tested with working power supply. Have
looked at the dead power supply (you can take it apart) but nothing
looks out of place.
Tim,
I know nothing about fish tank lighting (the last time I kept fish was 30-40
years ago and I believe it had a fluorescent light). However, I do know a bit
about electrics and electrical design.
You can buy specialist power supplies for LEDs from places such as LED Hut
https://ledhut.co.uk/search?type=product&q=+LED+Transformer
but they tend to be expensive. We used a 60 W item from them back in 2016 for
the model railway lighting (and it was half the price but wasn't dimmable).
A quick search for LED Transformer on Google yielded lots of hits with prices
much lower including:
https://www.seratechnologies.com/shop/led-transformer-12v/
The LED lights are just over 4ft long with three rows of LED's (it is a
5ft fish tank) so I guess 47 watt was the design wattage. There is a
long lead from the light about 5ft and then a small pig tail from the
power supply which then screw together with a male female round three
pin plug\socket. There is a small pig tail of about 15" inches which is
hard wired to the Power supply for the 240v mains.
I think that the three-pin plug may be a cheap and cheerful way of ensuring
that the power can't be plugged in the wrong way round, but it's possible that
the supply that you have monitors current draw and that is the sense wire.
(It's also possible that the cable dates back to the time when the company's
products were all powered directly from the mains (eg fluorescent or mains
striplight) and they had to include earth.) If you have a multimeter, I would
suggest buzzing all three pins out to see where they go (try both ends, eg
lights to plug and plug to supply, to try to ascertain what the third pin is
connected to.
Apart from that, does the broken PSU (or light) have a brand name or Model
Number? A search for that might provide a bit more information.
Hi Terry
Thanks for the two web site, I will bear them in mind, the only name on
the Power supply is the light manufacturer and model number for the
light. I have checked the mainboard in the power supply and can not find
an name of the main board. I was though able to confirm that there are
three cable in the output cable, a blue, brown and a black, I did note
that the black cable was around half the size of the blue and brown
cable. As you say I will have to use my multi meter on the pins on the
working power supply to work out what is what.
Unfortunately this project is going to have to go on the back burner for
a couple of week or so as I have new furniture arriving at the end of
the week which will involve me clearing existing furniture of items in
readiness and then rehoming into said new furniture which will take up
me a little while to sort out.
Thanks for the help
Tim H
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