Most lumens per watt

componentsefficiencyled

I recently started designing a pcb for flashing lights I want to use in a pavillon at festivals, garden parties and the like.

Now my question is, can anyone tell me which kind of LED that has the most lumens/watt?

  • 5mm clear LED's
  • Clear surfacemount PLCC LED's
  • 1 or 3 W LED's

I've previously experimented using 12-15 5mm which turned out pretty good as a "mini" spotlights, but I have no experience using highpowered LED's.

I want to build the poormans buck as supply on the back of the PCB, so I thought the surfacemount LED's would be the best, but only if they perform "okay" in terms of lm/W.

Note: They will be powered from the same large 12V batteries that runs the music.

— EDIT —

Yeah, I should definately have given more details. Im looking to make dance-lights in RGB colors as well as white for a strobe and perhaps UV. Number of channels doesn't matter too much, as long as I have at least one for R, G and B.

I AM on a budget, but not too tight either. My original plan was to have 4-6 PCB's with 50-ish LED's each (enough to make a lot of light in the dark), which is why I preferred 3-cent LED's over 50-cent ones.

Best Answer

Most lumens per watt is a moving target. It's even more of a moving target if you care what they cost. As such, browse your supplier's website/catalog and enter

  1. power
  2. lumens
  3. cost if you care about cost

into a spreadsheet, if, as is too often the case, they don't have a handy sorting tool that will list the results in lumens-per-watt directly. Make a formula for lumens/watts, and a formula including the cost if you care about cost, and see what you get. In 6 months, it will all be different.

As for the types you list, I'm pretty sure none of them are even in the running for that competition.

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