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Is there an idiots guide to this anywhere so I can pretend I understand a bit more? A quick skim suggests forward voltage is what it takes to kick it into life vs what is actually being drawn and used but that's probably wrong.
Edit; found this saying that LEDs etc don't follow ohms law etc https://lednique.com/current-voltage-relationships/iv-curves/
But this seems less an idiots guide and more a fairly capable person's guide.
CYOA-
Is there an idiots guide to this anywhere so I can pretend I understand a bit more?
Yes, it's called A level physics. You don't really need to understand LEDs (or any other mechanism for turning electricity into light) if you're just a user, you just need to be able to read and understand the rating labels on black boxes.
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LEDs have a fairly narrow voltage range below which they won’t light and above which they won’t light ever again, so the difference doesn’t matter.
For anything white 3V is a reasonable rule of thumb, but bright lights tend to put many diodes in series, which isn’t mentioned in the specs.
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Is there an idiots guide
The "Basic Optoelectronics" section of these university lecture notes from Kiel in English is interesting and not excessively technical if you want some ideas about what's happening to make light come out of semiconductors.
gbj_tester
grams
That's 8A at whatever the forward voltage of the LED array is. Total power consumption is <720W, so the mains power supply is going to pull about 3A at 240V