Led light woes

redfishbluefish · May 13, 2015

This has not been a good time for me with lights. As I've explained HERE, I had to rebuild my Apollo LEDs, where one is done and hanging in the tank, and the second is awaiting the LED beads coming on a slow boat from China. In the mean time I have been using an old TauTronics LED....one of the original China imports. Well the blue LEDs on the TauTronics decided not to fire up today, so I'm again without one light....or really, half a light, because the whites work just fine.

So what I've done is to use the two ATI Blue Plus T5's in place of the blue LED's....which I installed about a month ago or so...and the white channel on the TauTronics. I'm hoping that holds me over while I await delivery of one of those $78 165W Dimmable Full Spectrum LED Reef Aquarium Lights that I just ordered off of eBay.

With the TauTronics, I'm guessing that the power supply (DC driver) went out. If anyone knows were I could pick up a replacement DC driver, I'd appreciate it......and not something like a Meanwell, but a similar small driver that came with this unit that will drive 25 three watt LEDs at about 2 watts. I don't even know if these drivers are constant current or constant voltage! No labels!!!!

redfishbluefish · May 19, 2015

The LED beads arrived to finish up the repair of the Apollo's, which now allowed me to open up the TauTronics. As I had mentioned, the blues only were barely coming on and flickering a bit

When I opened up the TauTronics, I was first surprised to see a label.....on the drivers!!!

So I now know what drivers they used in these boxes.....which is a first. The one issue is that these high voltage drivers are hard to find. I think Mean Wells only go up to 48 volts. I thought I found the closest power supply HERE, with the picture showing it's 54-105 V, 600mA, but the words say it's only 33-68 V. If I could get the one in the picture, it most likely would work.

The other thing that was noted with this fixture was that the fans only came on when the white lights were on. I thought that was how it was designed. However, when I open it up and saw the two Bridge Rectifiers, I knew something wasn't right. Upon close inspection I found the one bridge rectifier controlling the fans from the blue power plug had a broken wire. It is supposed to have four wires coming in, and you can see the one broken one in the lower left of this picture.

Also, for a light that was hardly used, and the bridge rectifier just sitting there, it looks like it went through a war. I'm not sure if this was because that loose wire was touching other wires causing heat and damage, or what the cause, but it looks like heck. Either way, I'll replace both rectifiers.

I'm not going to even bother testing the power supply until the rectifiers have been replaced. So update to come when the rectifiers arrive and are installed.

hart24601 · May 19, 2015

Yikes!

redfishbluefish · May 19, 2015

Hart, no yikes needed....it's actually a relatively simple fix.....and only a couple bucks. I get some wierd gratificaition fixing stuff and bring it back to life. I'll hopefully never use this fixture again, but if I do, I'll know it's ready to go, because my other problem is that I'm a back-up fanatic....I have back-ups of almost everything.

hart24601 · May 19, 2015

Happy to hear it's not a big deal, the photo looks pretty wrecked!

redfishbluefish · Jan 19, 2018

I'm resurrecting this 2 1/2+ year old post because I'm finally getting around to fixing the Bridge Rectifier in this old TauTronics LED fixture. I ordered two rectifiers from UTSource HERE....for $0.43 each plus $2.00 shipping. I showed the burnt rectifier above, and here you can see where it's located in the fixture....Fried one is in the lower right, attached to the corner of the fan.

This was an easy switch out....un-soldered the old one, soldered the new one in with a little shrink tubing:

The good news is that the fans now worked properly....power ON, fans ON. The bad news is that the blue LED's were still flickering at very low intensity. To check to see if it was the driver, I flipped the wiring from the white drive to the blue LED's....same thing, flickering. Also plugged the blue driver into the white LED's, and they worked. So it's not a driver problem, but a problem with the LED board. I've done LED replacements before, but this TauTronics is very old (when LED fixtures first came out) and the LED's are not accessible, as best I can tell. They appear to be buried in an 1/8 inch of something (that's compressible), that on one side is strongly attached to a piece of plate aluminum, and covered with an aluminum foil cover that is not removable. So my first thought was to pick up a new board from SB Reef Lights for $70. However, upon further investigation, these old lights have much smaller glass than the newer LED lights. Here's the old TauTronics glass face and board: