Although the operating temperature of this LED might be up to 85 deg C, while looking through various datasheets, I couldn’t find a graph showing a plot of the expected life in hours vs temperature. If I were to guess I would say you need to run these at less than 50 degrees C to get some decent life out of them. There was a mention of a stress test in a datasheet and that meant for that particular led manufacturer running it at 60 degrees C full rated current for 1000 hours with no resulting damage.
If you have any info on these LED’s and what temperature they should be running at to get some decent life out of them, please leave a comment below.
So to finish up on this story I have to say that I learned some things about these LED strips. If I were to design something from scratch I would run some basic thermal calculations based on the figures from datasheets but in this case, with these chinese led strips, there is no datasheet, I can’t even easily compare to existing datasheet because these can’t be compared: the driving current is different, the LED only has one die in my case and so on.
The next thing I will try is to double my L shaped heatsink with another piece the same model and size this way I will be increasing my heatsink surface and hopefully cool the LED’s better, maybe shave another 5 degrees.
I will be posting an update with some measurements for comparison once I get the upgrade done. Links for the power supply, led dimmers as well as the light meter used in this video will be in the description of the video so do check them out.