Better than nothing, that’s for sure.
If you already have the 8 sockets, hell yeah. 120w of SI LEDs should put out much more light than 200w from a CFL, and it will be more evenly distributed. @TrevorLahey just pulled some phenomenal plants with em
Did he ever! That blew my mind!
China delivered. Decided to experiment with something inbetween screw-ins and solstrips/cobs.
@Palindrome, I ordered the dual strip dual color temp ones. Has your resistor hacking been proven successful with these yet?
Yes
I have been running these hacked strips a week for 1400 mA with no problems, the 700 mA light have been running for a month.
I have changed the wires, they are a little too thin and got warm.
Any one have an idea of the Power of this? About 25w?
The driver is 9 - 27.5 Watt max, so yeah 20-25 watt prolly ain’t that far off.
Thank you wonder if it would work in my 11”x11”x 20” box…
@Palindrome, so I did progress a little. After an untimely demise of my Chinese driver, found this baby on craigslist for a song.
Do you use thermal PSA tape? If so, any particular
one? I’m eyeing the cheapest amazon option…
Will be doing some aluminium chopping and screwing in the next week.
How do you tell what wattage you’re running them at?
Im using double sided thermal tape from E-bay, same as the LED-s cheapest one I could find.
Haven’t been able to find one that matces the strip 100%, so I just went with a 9-10 mm a little smaller then the strip but close enough.
A couple different ways are possible. One way is to spend some time choosing a driver that will only push the desired wattage. In my case, the driver I chose is 36V and is capabale of pushing a touch above 5A. With 5 COBs attached in parallel, each COB gets 36V x ~1A = ~36W. I could easily call that “close enough” for my comfort.
To be much more accurate, one could attach a multimeter to the driver and adjust the V and A potentiometers to the desired output. This method becomes particularly useful if one’s driver is far more powerful than necessary.
This is what I ended up with for my 2x2 tent, which is used for early veg and seed runs, if i ever get to them…
About $20 for Chinese full-spectrum LED strips at around 3500k. 12x15w = 180w nominal. Not sure what they actually draw. If they burn out, I’ll know to dial her back.
Some thick heavy aluminium lumber I had left over
Wire nuts, $20 of hangers and thermal tape, some wire
Meanwell hlg-240h-12a on craigslist for $60
All in - $100 CAD
I’ll report on how they do!
Edit: heat sinks, after a few hrs, are at 47C, and the driver is at 50C