Frequently Asked Questions

Yes! Our customers can be found all over the world, and we will ship to wherever you may be. We price the shipping on orders outside of the US and Canada individually so we may obtain the best rates for a given order. If you are interested in ordering, you can reach us through the contact form, or emailing us at info@sowilodesign.com with details on what you need and we will create the invoice manually.

 

No, the amplifiers are not needed to use Bifröst with a Hue Lightstrip Plus controller. It can be connected directly to the output of the controller, however in this configuration the power output will be limited by the 24W power supply and controller, just as it is with the unmodified Lightstrip Plus. This means longer lengths will dim, and the total lumens will be limited.

Another upside is that Bifröst Pro is about 50% more efficient than the Hue Lightstrip Plus so the total lumens will still increase from 1600 to about 2400 lumens.

The benefit of using the amplifiers is that this power restriction is removed so that the strips will not have reduced brightness with longer lengths. Note that the configuration with the amplifiers requires a larger 3rd party power supply.

 

We recommend Mean Well power supplies for use with our products, and specifically the HLG series of power supplies. These supplies are efficient, fanless, and built to last with a 7 year manufacturers warranty. When determining what wattage of supply is required, use the specified power rating from the product: best practice is to add 20% to the requirement to ensure the power supply is not pushed to it’s maximum.

For example, Bifröst-84 Pro consumes a maximum of 16 Watts per meter at 24 VDC, when all 5 channels are running at full power. For 5 meters, this means 16W x 5 = 80 Watts. Adding 20%, this is 80W x 1.2 = 96W. A good power supply selection for this example would be a Mean Well HLG-100H-24.

A more cost-effective power supply series by Mean Well for smaller projects that we also recommend is the XLG series.

 

Bifröst uses 5 channels to cover a full color gamut (like RGB), but the design is focused particularly on the quality of white over a broad range of white light color temperatures. Bifröst is unique from most other available options in that it maintains a consistently high CRI above 95 from very low color temperatures to high color temperatures (2200k to 6500k). When paired with our forthcoming ZigBee controller, Bifröst Pro is further improved by correcting for deviations in Duv (for example, the pink-ish hue tendency of the mixed white light that 2 channel tunable white systems often experience). For DMX control, we can provide the values on each channel for a range of white color temperatures to emulate this improvement for programming scenes.

For comparison:

• An RGB-only system, the different white color temperatures suffer from very low CRI, which makes objects in the room being illuminated look unnatural by exaggerating the red, green, and blue colors present and leaving the others completely dull.

• An RGBW system helps improve the low CRI issue, but the improvements are limited primarily to the color temperature of the single white LED, with the same issues of low CRI affecting white colors the farther away from it.

In addition to the focus on accurate, tunable white light over a wide range of color temperatures, we also design with high efficiency in mind. Typically, there is a significant decrease in efficacy (about 25%) to go from a CRI of 80 to CRI of 95 with the same design. Bifröst Pro has an efficacy of up to 137 lumens per watt while maintaining a CRI of 95 or greater at 6500k. This is far higher than most standard 80 CRI LED strip efficiencies.

 

Yes, we offer a 5 year warranty on all LED strip lights, amplifiers and controllers. Warranty includes the cost of replacement or repair of the materials.

 

CRI stands for Color Rendering Index, and is a metric used to determine how accurately white light represents the colors of the objects it is illuminating. It is a scale that goes to 100, where 100 represents the most accurate representation of a range of colors. The number also represents an average value of the R (rendering) value for 8 different reference sample colors.

Regular CRI as a metric has some limitations, especially when it comes to LED lighting. There is an extended CRI which uses 15 instead of 8 sample colors. Most important for LEDs, which is not captured well by regular CRI is the R9 (saturated red) and R12 (saturated blue). This is due to the rolloff of energy typical in the spectrum of LEDs at high wavelengths (above 600 nm) where red light is emitted (R9 values can often be really low, below 20 for an 80 CRI LED), as well as the spike typical in LEDS at around 460 nm wavelength (blue light, which over saturates R12, as well as leaving the colors around the blue light such as cyan completely unsaturated). Nevertheless, it is still a valuable metric as a quick and simple way to compare the quality of white light for different white LEDs.

In the future, more comprehensive metrics such as TM-30-15 will become more commonplace as they provide a more complete analysis of the quality of white light.

 

CCT stands for Correlated Color Temperature, and is used to describe the ‘color’ of white light. It is a scale measured in Kelvins that represents a reference lighting source (the temperature of a black body radiator; think of a candle, an incandescent light bulb, or the sun). Typically, values for lighting range from 2700k (a warm white bulb) to 6500k (noon daylight, or cool white light), but can also extend beyond that in either direction, such as the 2200k white LED Bifröst uses to reproduce accurate warmer light closer to candle light.