HLG-185H-48 running at 150w efficiency question.

I'm going to be running 10 EB Gen 3 2 footers, with the 185H-48 in 2 series of 5 parallel. This gives me a sweet spot of 7.8A at 19.15V and about 150w. I've heard that if you run your driver at lower wattage efficiency goes down.

Do I lose a lot of efficiency running a 185w (actually 187.2w) driver at 150w?

tilopa said:

I'm going to be running 10 EB Gen 3 2 footers, with the 185H-48 in 2 series of 5 parallel. This gives me a sweet spot of 7.8A at 19.15V and about 150w. I've heard that if you run your driver at lower wattage efficiency goes down.

Do I lose a lot of efficiency running a 185w (actually 187.2w) driver at 150w?

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I'm curious about this too. I have always read the datasheet's efficiency vs load chart as being the watts from fixture divided by rated watts of the driver. So in your case, 150/185=81% of the "load" being used. If that were the case, it seems like the driver would still be well above 90% efficiency which would be nice.

Hopefully someone can come along and correct me if I have misread this all wrong.

Efficiency vs Load, page 6 in the specs

One question which has somewhat eluded me, is how does dimming affect load? Is dimming vs load related to the set dimmed level being considered as the maximum possible load, or is it the maximum load available from the driver when set to max. Obviously this isn't a question for non-dimmed drivers.

PJ Diaz said:

One question which has somewhat eluded me, is how does dimming affect load? Is dimming vs load related to the set dimmed level being considered as the maximum possible load, or is it the maximum load available from the driver when set to max. Obviously this isn't a question for non-dimmed drivers.

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I've wondered this too, but is PWM dimming actually changing the current? from what I understood it achieves dimming by turning the module on and off thousands of times per second so that to our perception it appears dimmed. Anybody know if this is correct or something I am misunderstanding?

shimbob said:

Efficiency vs Load, page 6 in the specs

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Wow, good information, I guess I should have dug a litter deeper in the spec sheet. This is interesting because the graph shows that efficiency does not start to drop until below %50 load. And if running at 115v it starts to drop a little past %80. In any case I should be good.

loco41 you are correct.

ilovereggae said:

I've wondered this too, but is PWM dimming actually changing the current? from what I understood it achieves dimming by turning the module on and off thousands of times per second so that to our perception it appears dimmed. Anybody know if this is correct or something I am misunderstanding?

Click to expand...

to my understanding the driver isnt switched directly by a external given pwm signal ( i once thought that too).
there is a logic in front, the 3in1 dimming (detection circuit in the block diagram of the datasheet).
the pwm pfc control logic then will interpret all inputs to corensponding values the driver works with.
in the end it doesnt matter if you dimm by external dimming or by the onboard screws, the internal logic will set it straight for you.
i would guess the control logic set the duty cycle of a internal pwm signal you cant directly influence the freqeuncy, more duration, of but the duty cycle.