Chinese AC leds, running of a DC power suply

Baf05

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I have been doing some thinking as I was faced with junking 30 to 40 strings of chinese bought led strings. I did a little bit of reaserch and found that they may work using a dc power supply.
I have already purchased an APS3003S power supply for testing lights.
So I took a string of leds that I had cut the controller off and attached it to the APS, and found that at around 24 volts DC the lights worked. Colour me pleased....
...but...
Question time, is the safe to do? I dont care if I over drive them and break them if I can use them for even a year thats one year more than I was going to get.
If this is going to work can I then connect these Strings to the DC48 and run them through that?
 

David_AVD

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AS long as it seems to be working without distress you should be good. You can work out the required current using the wiki info and counting how many sections there are in a string.
 

fasteddy

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LEDs are actually DC devices, so when they run in AC then there are usually 2 scenarios.

1: They have a bridge rectifier in the controller that turns the AC signal to a DC signal

or

2: They are what they call 1/2 wave LEDs meaning they run from AC but because AC alternates the direction of flow every cycle then the LED will only be on for 1/2 a cycle and thus you may see high frequency flickering from the LEDs

So i would think that these should work fine as long as they are not mains voltage 240v strings.
 

Baf05

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its very good news then. I was worried that a lot of strings I have collected would be wasted, now I can still use them :)
 

fasteddy

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David_AVD said:
Eddy, he's wanting to use them on a DC power supply so no flickering issues.

I know he wants to run them in DC, i was just explaining what the basic reason why you can use them happily with DC if you cut the controller off, because AC lights usually come in those 2 configurations so running them on DC is the best way. May have not actually made that as clear now reading back
 

David_AVD

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ɟɐsʇǝppʎ said:
I know he wants to run them in DC, i was just explaining what the basic reason why you can use them happily with DC if you cut the controller off, because AC lights usually come in those 2 configurations so running them on DC is the best way. May have not actually made that as clear now reading back

Ah, the old baffle them with science routine eh? LOL :D
 
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