Unless you want to experiment with those 2 channel X3 strips he’s now selling there is no big advantage i can see. Bit less wiring and drilling i suppose. Six X2 strips are equal to four X3 strips in terms of light output, power consumption and heat created. The X3 versions do cost quite a bit more though and i don’t mind fitting a couple more strips in a rack…
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Not knocking the guys products but why use them when you can get cheaper strips that only run 80f maxed out and no need for heat sinks?
for me, it’s because I already had them. Two years ago, the Bridgelux EB Gen 2 were no where near as cheap as they are today. At the time, the Samsung chips were all the rage and a massive upgrade from my Cree COBs.
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Here’s my take. A few years back i ditched the HPS rigs and was working with series wired cob rigs. One running at almost 300V DC and another at just over 200. Having potentially fatal voltages in grow tents made me more paranoid than growing the weed.
I’ve just been reading another thread where a guy is building a rig using those EB strips. To get 240W from them is going to involve mounting and wiring up 18 strips in a combination of series and parallel connections and running them at close to 180V DC which at 1.5A could certainly be fatal.
I’m currently only running one rig, a rack made up of eight X2 solsticks, it gets barely warm running at 280W and the working voltage is only 24V DC.
It’s a lot less work to build and wire a rack of only 8 strips wired in parallel and in terms of cost, either build works out roughly in the same ball park anyway.
The safety issue means it’s a no-brainer for me tbh.
Also im old and getting lazy these days so i go for easier build every time 
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What’s the amperage? A human can take extreme voltage at very low amperage. With the hps rigs there is a 4000v pulse that ignites the light and it runs at 200v and those weren’t a problem. I’m more afraid of the fan in the tent running 110v 5a than I am of my fixtures running 240v .7a. You can be killed by 12v at a high enough amperage. Aed uses 45A and anywhere from 100-3000 v. To me the added heat made those less if a choice since I was swapping from hps to help reduce heat. I guess I’m lucky in that I waited long enough for there to be multiple options to choose from on the market.
I never liked the voltages involved with HPS or MH fixtures either, glad to get rid of the things.
It’s high voltage combined with a decent current that kills btw. high current is not enough on it’s own to pass through the skin barrier although you can get a bad burn.
I’ve worked with electrics for over 30yrs and had lots of low voltage high current shocks in that time, sometimes from starter circuits in trucks and marine vessels up to small ships in size. They usually run 24V starter circuits carrying many hundreds of Amps, 500A is not uncommon.
Half an Amp of current being pushed by a high enough voltage can kill you, especially if you have a heart condition. Saying that i’ve had a few shocks from our 240V mains at boatyards and other sites over the years, the reason I’m still here is i wasn’t the main conductor for the return path. Electrons don’t just take the path of least resistance, they take all paths but most of the flow will follow the route/s of least resistance thankfully or many of us wouldn’t still be here.
The circulation fans i use are 5" case fans for PC’s, i run them at between 10 and 12V and they use around 50mA each which is tiny amount of current. I use several to get decent air movement, they last for years and never need their bearings lubricated. Also they are almost silent. Nothing inside my grow tent nowadays runs above 24V, the led driver and extractor are all external.
No high voltages near water containing salts! mineral plant food comprises mainly of salts and salt turns water into a conductor btw
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that sounds like me O: this is the build. Shouldn’t be any more dangerous than the build with the COBs before, unless I’ve cocked the wiring and it gets loose, but if that happens i’ll see it before anything and as its suspended, shouldnt be a hazard. I could always wire up a ground somehow but those connectors and wago connectors do a really good job.
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If you double insulate wiring and connectors (where you practically can do so) and as you say run an earth wire from the frame/s to the drivers case you should be fine. Could you do a mainly parallel connection job on those strips to keep the working voltage below 50V ? I suppose it’s down to the available range of drivers eh. I always prefer high current low voltage setups. Years of working mainly with 12 and 24V DC systems will do that. Most working in the electromechanics industry take virtually no precautions when the system voltages are below 50 and will commonly work on live systems to save time. I know a guy who claims to be able to tell the difference between low voltage AC or DC by the feel of the shock 
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No matter the voltage or amperage you should treat every circuit like it can kill you IMHO. Thinking oh it’s low voltage so no biggie creates complacency and complacency kills many! On my builds all the wiring was trimmed to where no conductors were showing out of the push connectors then covered in liquid electrical tape as well as the solder spots on the strips as my wife sometimes cares for the plants and is ignorant to anything electrical so I made damn sure you had to really really work at it to find a point to get shocked. I agree if you’re running remote drivers you should ground the fixture to the driver body at a minimum. I have 4 drivers mounted to an aluminum plate and all of my leads going to the lights panels were 3 conductor instead of 2 so I could attach the ground on the plate for the drivers and to the panel. Thinking that 2 grounds per panel should suffice. I just wish I could run them on a gfci but for some reason LED doesn’t like them. My cob rig wouldn’t like with a cord with built in gfci but worked perfectly without it. Need to check into higher amp GFCI breakers to put in my panel and just protect that entire circuit going to my room.
Most people don’t know that water in its pure form will not conduct electricity, it’s the minerals, mainly salts, that make it a conductor. Mr. Wizard showed us geek kids that in the 80s lol. I was told by an electrical engineer I was retarded for saying that until I proved it for him just like Mr wizard did on tv lol
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Yes, the ‘bite’ is definitely different between AC and DC, can confirm! 
Mean Well has some ‘beefy’ low voltage/high current drivers.
I was looking at the HLG-600H 42 (42V, 14.3A) but changed that to 2x HLG-320H-42 (42V, 15.3A) for my application - saved a few bucks too.
Cheers
G
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Your on the ball there bro any sparky will tell you 42V is way safer than messing with high voltages especially in close proximity to salt water.
I’ve had loads of high tension jolts from ignition circuits in my lifetime and yeh that pulse is unmistakable lol. Got loads from old outboard motors as a youngster also loads from soaking wet trail bikes and old British cars. We used to pull spark plug caps off one cylinder at a time to find the duffer lol. You could give a passing mechanic a jolt from a running engine by passing him a spanner while touching a live HT lead. Those old engines had contact breaker ignition systems so no risk to the cars ignition circuit and as pointed out earlier the tiny current involved meant very low risk to us grease balls who fixed the things even with plug firing voltages over 20KV.
It takes both current and voltage to kill but when the working voltage goes above 100 it takes surprisingly little current to do a terminal breakdance. As little as quarter of an Amp could do you in. Stay safe folks!
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It took me forever to wrap my head around this fact.
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Some like the old - pipe carrying water comparison. The pressure (psi, bar etc) behind the water acts a bit like the voltage (pressure) in an electrical circuit pushing electrons . Water under high enough pressure can cut steel and it can cut through human skin like it wasn’t even there. The nozzle might well be a tiny diameter so the flow (current) is very low but the psi (voltage) is so high it is capable of massive damage. A bit like a small diameter round fired from a rifle traveling at supersonic speed. The round might be small but the impact energy is not.
A good analogy for a shock from a low voltage high current source = Fill a trash can full of water and pour it over a guy. He’ll feel it but probably wont be harmed even although the volume of water was quite large.
If you take a syringe full of that same water and apply a high enough pressure behind it and squirt him instead it could pass right through his skin and may even be fatal.
Sorry if i come across as patronizing, i’m stoned while trying to find terms that most folk would understand…and probably failing badly 
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