LED lighting repair – Unbranded LED Parcan

LED lighting repair - Safety Earth repair

This LED lighting repair was a bit of a horror story! Aside from fixing the problems with the two lights brought in, they needed several modifications to improve the unit safety.

They were brought to me by a Grantham based DJ. One of the lights wouldn’t power up, whilst the other had a flicker on the red LEDs.

The powerup issue was caused by a faulty power board. The unit has a cheap SMPS that the customer informed me had blown up before and been replaced by the manufacturer. Unfortunately they couldn’t provide spare this time so I swapped in the PSU from the Red flicker unit.
LED lighting repair - new grille
I then repaired the red flicker unit by reflowing the red joints on the front face. Although I found another off the shelf internal supply to fix this, the replacement boards were judged to be too expensive to warrant this course of action. Instead, I fitted a DC socket to allow the customer to power the unit from a cheap external power supply. This also gets around the safety issues detailed below by removing mains from the unit.

I was quite alarmed by the breaches of safety good practice in these LED lights.

The first thing that I spotted was dubious safety earth connection – shown in the picture. The manufacturer had simply twirled the safety earth round a mounting pillar and screwed a nut on top. Unsurprisingly, The earth connection was already loose when I opened the unit. I fixed this by soldering the wire to a solder tag and refixing to the pillar using a Nyloc nut. These are special nuts that do not loosen in the same way as traditional nuts. To comply with safety regulations, the safety earth should have its own fixing point, but this was impossible to modify without compromising the unit function.
LED lighting repair - new power board
The next safety issue that I noticed suring the LED lighting repair was that the board’s PSU was next to a grille with large holes, allowing a person with small fingers (a child) to inadvertently touch the AC mains through the chassis. this was particularly worrying, so I fitted a mesh with 3mm holes inside the existing grille. I used Nylon fixings to prevent any connection of the mesh to the mains board.

If you have an LED lighting repair, please contact me.