Electronics > Beginners
Streetlight LED driver is open to the air.......therefore needs confomal coating
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ocset:
Hello,
We took apart a mains connected streetlight “head” from China.   :-/O   :-/O   :-/O
The head had a hole which was for sliding onto the vertical pole (lamp post).

This hole was quite a tight fit to the pole, but obviously not an absolutely perfect seal…so in other words, air and moisture and small dust particles would be able to get inside the head through this tiny gap between pole and “head-hole”.       :scared:

Now, inside the streetlight head was the LED driver inside a plastic enclosure. We noticed that the plastic enclosure was not totally enclosed, but had air gaps around the connectors at each end of the plastic box….so in other words, the LED driver PCB and electronic components were in fact “open to the air”.   :-BROKE

Given this “Open-air” nature, do you think that the LED driver PCB would need to be conformal coated?   :-//
I mean, for example, we noticed that there was a TO220 switching FET in the LED driver enclosure which had straight legs into its PCB footprint (and so not much clearance between drain and source pins)

Or do you think that it would even need potting to prevent dust and moisture from ingressing into and around the PCB and electronic components? (obviously some way would need to be found to prevent the potting compound from escaping while it cures during the potting procedure)
 8)
TomS_:
Not sure I would call that "open to the air". That seems like a bit of a stretch.
mdszy:
Like TomS_ said, it's definitely not "open to the air" - are you under the impression that electronics used outdoors are all hermetically sealed or something?  :-DD

Conformal coating is definitely inexpensive and an easy way to protect things, but from how it sounds it's not totally necessary in this case. I'd go so far as to call potting it overkill.
Ian.M:
It depends on the size of the holes.  Mud dauber wasps or Mason bees can do a lot of damage.
mzzj:
"Nobody in our company has any electronics design experience and we built a led streetlight for antarctica based on random tips over eevblog forums.
Now the ceramics are cracking, case is filling up with condensing water and police is complaining that the lights flicker"
"and the germans don't want to buy our streetlights for their antarctic submarines because the streetlights are not manufactured in Germany"

If you pot the LEDs with Electrolube ER1448RP250G potting compound it helps to reduce the visible flicker by 100%  :-DD
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