DIY LED - Group Buy

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

I am tazlking about a driver and power supply in one unit. I have looked at both ways and find no advantage to one over the other aside from a all in one unit "can" under the right situations be cheeper and the end result is usaly much cleaner.

The major advantage of using a separate power supply is having the ability to adjust the supply voltage to match the number and type of LEDs which results in higher efficiency. In addition it's cheaper up front and long term if you ever have any failures. With an all in one drivers you're paying for multiple power supplies in each driver as appose to using one single power supply for all your LEDs. If a single part fails in one an AIO driver you're pretty much forced to replace the whole thing which can be expensive if you're paying $100+ a driver. Using a separate power supply will allow you to easily replace individual inexpensive drivers for a fraction of the cost and if your power supply failed they are not too expensive and can even be purchased locally so you won't have any down time.

As for a cleaner look I guess it depends on your design, but I think the AIOs are bulky and having a large number of them makes things the opposite of clean. Using a separate power supply means one power supply that can be installed virtually anywhere like under the stand or in an electrical compartment and the drivers are very low profile and can be as small as a couple square inches making them very east to build into your heat sink.

I've also noticed a lot of the stand alone drivers offer both 0-10V and PWM control so if you're not sure which one you want to use the option will always be there without having to change out drivers down the road.

The AIO have the advantage of simplicity and perhaps better suited for smaller builds only requiring one or two drivers. But for larger lighting systems which use many drivers for more levels of control I think the stand alone approach is the way to go.