I was looking at replacement boards for the 12V 10W 2811 I/O flood lights on AliExpress the other day. In the photos for one listing I noticed that the board was marked as 12V - 24V, not just 12V as advertised.
A quick check of some older and new flood lights that I had revealed that they too were marked 12V - 24V. The capacitor strung across the power input was rated at 35V, which was a good sign too. The red arrows in the image below highlights this.
Last night I hooked one of them up to a pixel tester and a 24V power supply. When set to white, the current draw was ~ 640mA @ 12V. This reduced to ~ 380mA @ 24V, confirming that the constant current drivers were dealing with the increased voltage.
Something else I noticed was that there is a colour shift towards red when the power is only slightly under 12V. Running these floods from 24V would seem to have the benefit of less current flowing in the cabling. This in turn means less voltage drop and also totally avoids the colour skew that can happen at under 12V.
So far I've only run one of the lights on 24V for about 30 minutes, but I'll be changing the 4 out in my display on the weekend to a 24V supply. This means I don't have to worry about the 24V -> 12V step down converter I was using to power them. I can just use the 24V that I have going into the yard.
A quick check of some older and new flood lights that I had revealed that they too were marked 12V - 24V. The capacitor strung across the power input was rated at 35V, which was a good sign too. The red arrows in the image below highlights this.
Last night I hooked one of them up to a pixel tester and a 24V power supply. When set to white, the current draw was ~ 640mA @ 12V. This reduced to ~ 380mA @ 24V, confirming that the constant current drivers were dealing with the increased voltage.
Something else I noticed was that there is a colour shift towards red when the power is only slightly under 12V. Running these floods from 24V would seem to have the benefit of less current flowing in the cabling. This in turn means less voltage drop and also totally avoids the colour skew that can happen at under 12V.
So far I've only run one of the lights on 24V for about 30 minutes, but I'll be changing the 4 out in my display on the weekend to a 24V supply. This means I don't have to worry about the 24V -> 12V step down converter I was using to power them. I can just use the 24V that I have going into the yard.