Cheap LED Strips : A Viable Alternative

Thank you @Shadey! You are amazing I’m looking through the links now.

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I built one with the parts shady listed and infi from this thread. Honestly the hardest part is drilling your holes to mount the boards and not screwing up… I had to go from self tappers to machine screws/nuts cause of slightly off holes.
22"x22" 10 of the 3500 k 22" strips and the 150 meanwell AB driver plus potentiometer. I think I’m I to it for about 150 canadian
edit also added a sonoff pow to make it have it’s own timer

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Nice looking rig :thumbsup:

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Totally impossible to read this thread stoned.
Thank goodness for sil’s.
And floods.

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One thing to watch out for when wiring the strips in series is that the strips themselves have a max working voltage.

From table 2, note 3 of the datasheet for the eb series gen 2:

Since these have a vf of 20, then 3 should be the limit in series (as far as I understand it).

I found this out earlier this week when proposing my strip build over on the LEDGardener forum.

Can probably get away with it, but I’m looking at 100% parallel options for now. :thinking:

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I forgot to post it here, but I managed to re-use components from my old mars hydro 900w with those bridgelux strips. works really nicely

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Well here’s my understanding of it but don’t take it as gospel, your voltage is divided across all the items within the circuit based upon their current draw and resistance, now if the strips are say absurdly mismatched in a sense like one strip has three times the resistance of the other strip in say a 2 strip series circuit it will pull 3 times the voltage as V=IxR .

But we are limiting the current, so the strips will only pull the max amount of voltage based upon their resistance which is affected by temperature and their manufacture. So even with variances they won’t be that drastic.

That 60v is the operating voltage of the insulation, so say in a situation like your feeding a circuit that has one strip at a “fixed” voltage of say 80v but your also limiting the current to say 700ma the strip will take 19.5v of that leaving the other 60.5v to be taken by the insulation wire ect as the voltage is fixed and it has to go somewhere.

But say your hlg drivers they are constant current and constant voltage, but your circuit will only take what the limiting factor is whether current or voltage, your xlg drivers are just constant current, but the voltage will range within a spectrum with them such as example an xlg-240-l-ab has 178 ~ 342V range which would dictate you only being able to run 9 well “9.13” to 17 of the 19.5v strips, where as say if you hooked up only 6 strips to that same driver in series, then your gonna have a stray 61v that has to go somewhere which will be your wire, insulation, connection terminals and the likes and thats when your gonna run into that over voltage situation. But again that when feeding a fixed voltage or a voltage with a fixed lowest point and your drawing less than that.

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I think I see what you mean. Seems to make sense to me. It was news to me that the number was so low, I assumed it was at least 200v.

Right now I’m planning 10 EB2 strips in parallel on an XLG-100-24.

Since it puts out 4 amps (16-24v constant current region, strips are ~20v), with 10 strips, the strips would be at .4a.

I’m thinking if I run them that low I wouldn’t need a heat sink but I’m not sure…

They max at .7 amps and I’d be running them at .4.

Still just white boarding, but I could put that light together for about 120$ including shipping from digi key and the metal from home depot.

In theory, I would be using it in a 2x2 tent, about 25 watts per sq foot at 12 inches in flower.

Not sure yet, just brainstorming…

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well at the nominal .7a most people don’t run heatsink anyways look at toast and trev’s builds or the handful of other people running them, they would just be warm to the touch as they do run quite cool, i just mounted mine to an aluminum plate cause i could and just incase i needed it but honestly i could run them by themselves and they would be fine.

Also right now im running mine at around 23w/sqft at 18" and was getting photo toxicity issues when i was running in the 35-40w/sqft range so… yeah what that target should be is more up in the air and depends on the environment.

Also id look into the xlg-150’s as its only a couple dollars more, better to have too much that you can dial back than realizing you have too little and need to get a new driver, not saying that will happen if planning for 25w/sqft but just a consideration.

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I think you’re right, I probably will go for the XLG-150-24. It’s like 3 more dollars… Haha. Plus if necessary the 150 can dim all the way to about 80 watts from the wall, thanks for the advice!

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For those of you that wired these strips, how exactly do the wires stay in the little sockets on the strip?

When I insert wire into the socket (or whatever it’s called), nothing grabs it, it just sits in there loose. I’ve tried 14-18 guage wire and it’s all the same.

What am I missing?

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Is your wire single core?

I tried multi on my last one and it wouldn’t work.

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Push harder… till you think it will break lol. First ones scary. Are you using solid core?

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@Shadey @Grease_Monkey

Braided… X_x

Guess I better go back to home depot… Again
… LOL this is probably 4th time in 4 days

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Lol I think youd have to solder it to get it stiff enough. I used wire way too thick so they were probably extra hard to get in

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I think I saw your build with the blue frame. Looked great :+1: was it 14 guage wire?

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I think I used 12 or 14. The bridgelux specs say 18-24 lol

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I used a 20 amp rated single core, I had to destroy one of those clips, trying to get the wire out, to flip the strip around, I had it upside down, so the poles were reversed :dizzy_face:

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That’s why they have the little tab, you push down on it and it opens the teeth, @MumenRyder just make sure your striped part of the wire is long enough

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I’m not sure which tabs you mean, I was trying to find something like that on there but couldn’t… When I’m home again tomorrow I’ll see if I can figure it out. Thanks for the heads up :+1:

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