LED

Yes if someone has an LED that offers temporary reverse breakdown.

Back when I was still in school, my instructor said that, yes, any diode (I guess that includes LEDs) will work as a zener except that zeners will regulate the voltage better than an ordinary diode. A zener has a sharper knee (is that the correct term? It's been a long time) than the standard diode.

Besides, not all LEDs are created equal. They will exhibit different breakdown voltages so if you damage one, you'll have difficulty finding one that exactly matches the old one.

However, I fail to understand why you would want to use a nice LED, whose purpose is to give off light when forward biased, and use it as a zener which it was not designed for and will not work as well as a zener.

Unless you're just curious, so that's okay.

This is not difficult to try. Just get an LED, a resistor, a power supply and a multimeter.

regards,

Vulcan

NO.! The forward voltage drop of a diode is 0.7 V. A diode is used to prevent reverse current. A LED is a special diode which will emit light in a specific frequency . (read colour) the LED needs to be current limited in almost all applications to about 20 ma. use the V= I X R relationaship to establish resistor values. do not forget that AC voltage numbers are RMS values (Multiply by 1.414 for peak AC voltage) If you use RMS the diode will probably burn out. I have used LED's as power "on" indicators for voltages up to 600 V AC. apparently the diode does not like this but it worked fine!