Water-Cooled LED Light

[Matt] wanted to drive a Yuji LED array. The LED requires 30 V and at 100 watts, it generates a lot of heat. He used a Corsair water cooling system made for a CPU cooler to carry away the heat. The parts list includes a microphone gooseneck, a boost converter, a buck converter (for the water cooler) and custom-made brackets (made from MDF). There’s also a lens and reflector that is made to go with the LED array.

This single LED probably doesn’t require water cooling. On the other hand, adding a fan would increase the bulk of the lighted part and the gooseneck along with the water cooling tubes looks pretty cool. This project is a good reminder that if you need to carry heat away from something with no fans, self-contained water cooling systems are fairly inexpensive now, thanks to the PC market.

We might have put a shorting jack in the LED power line to do the current measurement. In the video, he cuts the wire to monitor it for a first-time calibration. Another alternative would be to build a digital ammeter into the box.

The link in the parts list looks like it moved. The LED is the 400HS which is a 100-watt array and is available in both a warm white and daylight white version. There’s also a circular version and the cost is around $75 at the moment. If you want something much less expensive, there’s an eBay link to a similar device for about $7. However, the parts list notes that the color rendition is not as good as the Yuji unit (and in the video below, you can see the color difference in a photo at time 13:30).

This build is not inexpensive but is certainly simplerĀ than previous water-cooled lamp projects we’ve seen. On the other hand, a custom system can let you make use of the hot water you produce.

15 thoughts on “Water-Cooled LED Light

  1. The eBay LEDs really are a crapshoot.

    I’ve ordered a number of different ones (both in 1W and 100W chips), and some are absolute garbage and some are of astounding quality for the price. I regret that I don’t know where I got the first 100W chip; it has excellent color, build quality (thick copper base instead of aluminum or brass), and all LEDs light evenly. The most recent are the polar opposite; light, thin brass bases (barely half the total weight of the good one), a VERY strange color, and the individual diodes are very poorly matched.

    It’s more than a little frustrating, because I don’t like gambling, but, at the same time, I abhor the thought of paying over $70 for a name-brand module.

        1. or you can ask anyone who has had a PICC, PIC, or central line. Short term, 1000 units per mL is accepted as a peripheral line lock agent, 5000 per mL if those lines are expected to stay for a month or more. It used to be accepted wisdom that 10,000 units per mL was better for central lines, and it does allow them to stay dormant for a month without flushing. Now, you just have to figure out the blood flow that is exposed to the active cross section of any of those lines over the 72 hours expected for 1000 u/mL or 30 days for 10,000u/mL locks.

  2. Gah, dont step up drill sized to make a bigger hole. Properly clamp the part to a piece of wood or plastic spoil board and drill it the size you need it. Stepping up just makes poorly located holes and a much better chance of catching and tearing the part.

    If you do a lot of thin sheet metal work invest in a set of good uni-bits, they have no or little rake so they will not catch as easily on soft metals like aluminum and brass and they also work great on plastics like acrylic.

    He is also wiring the pot wrong. The outer two pins of the trim pot he broke off should be ground and +v and the center the wiper. He is connecting his external pot to +v and gnd so he is probably shorting out the supply somehow.

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