Today I'm going to show you how I got over 7,000 lumens from
this tiny little LED chip. If you want to take your building and modding to the
absolute extreme to squeeze out every last drop you possibly can there's one
thing that you always need to remember. Thermal path is king! Now I wanted to
find out how much we could really really push that limit so I decided to take it
to the next level and try some liquid cooling and I ordered some copper tubing
like this for the pump on our water-cooled LED
project I decided to use a fish tank pump because they're low-voltage 12 volt
DC which is pretty close to what we'll need and I went to O'Riley's and picked
up some brake line tubing what I did was I took two pieces and cut them to length
and then butted them up side-by-side and then I reflow solder the LED over the
top of them I put the battery negative contact right
directly on the copper soldered together with the thermal pad of the LED and only
left the battery positive side overhanging so that I would have as much
contact with the copper as possible next I attached the vacuum lines to the
end of our copper tubing and tested the pump now all we need is our water
reservoir this little pump does a really good job of circulating the water
unfortunately my tubing doesn't do a very good job of keeping it in so I had
no real choice but to turn to epoxy which is one of my least favorite ways
to do things but in this case it works once our two-part epoxy had a chance to
dry I came back and gave it another shot only to find that we still had more
leaks somehow it never occurred to me that in between the two pieces of copper
tubing the water would leak out that's all right
more epoxy now that we have our coolant in place
it's time to give it a shot and test this out I'll just hook up the led to my
bench power supply so that we can monitor the voltage and amperage and I
check the datasheet for our XHP70 LED and if I'm reading it correctly this
particular emitter is rated at 3,773 lumens at 4800 milliamps if you're not
familiar with this setup I do have a video that shows how to make it and also
if you're watching this that number right there is not the actual lumen
count you have to multiply that number times 10 and then times 0.37 the major
advantage of building a water-cooled LED flashlight is how stable the output is
even when we get up into super high amperage it just stays perfectly level
well some of you may be thinking that's all fine and dandy that you were able to
get about double out of an LED that was only rated around half of that but how
is that going to go into a flashlight well I'm glad I asked the first thing is
getting for a project is a nice piece of brass tubing next we are going to use a
copper MCPCB but not just like it is I decided to take it and put it in my
lathe and basically cut a hole in the center of it in the bottom to make the
pad between the LED and the water as thin as possible with that done I will
reflow solder the MCPCB and the LED emitter together on the end of our piece
of tubing with that done I made a small collar so that I can slip around the
tube for our reflector to sit on
I ran the tube that will pump the water in all the way up to about a half inch
from the very top so that the coldest water will be hitting the base of the MC
PCB where the LED is and I put the tube that takes it out just a couple of
inches in there and you guessed it more epoxy I reached out to my company's
graphic design team to see if they could come up with a sketch to help everybody
better understand what this setup is like and here's what they came up with
they don't get paid much next I ran the wires for our LEDs up through the base
of the plastic collar this will allow the reflector to sit flat since the
needs of our pump and our LED electrically are so different I'm going
to have to run two different batteries to them for the pump I'm going to stick
with my 3x 18650 setup but for the LED I want to drive it really really hard so I
want to use 26650 so I took an old mag light tube and I gutted the switch and
wired up hard contacts to it and sleeved it for my batteries then I ran the wires
up to a 10 amp JudCo switch I ran a separate switch for the water pump my
first idea for the water pump was to stick a two on the other end of it and
use a water jug a plastic bottle basically to fill up for my reservoir
however I even after repeated attempts I couldn't get the pump to prime and so
that was out after scouring the cabinets at my house and trying to find something
I could sacrifice I settled on a mason jar now all we need to do is attach our
reflector can guess how we're going to do that some epoxy why would you think
that
now that we have everything basically hooked up it's time to test the output
of our light on the new power supply around five amps is what I got initially
which sounds really low but remember we're on a 12 volt MC PCB now and not a
six volt setup like we were before running only my 4 26650 s really wasn't
going to get us there so after bleeding off the over voltage from the cells I
decided to add some more voltage by sticking and nickel metal hydride
battery in there with it instead of my spacer pure new - modding don't just try
stuff with batteries it's really important that you know what you're
doing so don't be all you all right I learned it by watching you because I
said stuff can happen now with the over voltage drained off the cells this did
give me a more stable current for long term but it didn't really boost the
output it just put me back basically right where I was so I went ahead and
added another cell now we're getting somewhere this is basically right on par
with where we were at before in fact we got just slightly higher out the gate
than what we had in the first place so I'm happy with that
now all we need is an effective way to cart this mess around I assure you the
Ghostbusters are so jealous right now the beam of our water-cooled LED
flashlights is pretty much what you'd think it's all of the power of a
multi emitter setup concentrated into one tight hot spot
even after minutes and minutes of runtime you don't notice visually any
drop here's a shot of the ACE beam l16 that I reviewed recently with its xhp 35
high LED now our water cooled LED flashlight did you learn something from
the video was it entertaining to you let me know if you got something out of it
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watching good luck