Will do a update later today on the plants, noticed a ph swing issue last night so they should be happy again today.
Mounted those 14w SMD boards to some cpu heat sinks, and wired and mounted them up in my pc case.
I was redoing some wattage testing of the old setup but i noticed that my PC case was only running at Half power “WTF”. Turns out when i did a refresh 3 months ago and swapped the vero 18’s over to this case, i wired them in parallel thinking they were running off the same 700ma drivers i was using on the other case. Well i forgot that the ones that were mounted on this case were actually 350ma higher volt versions that i was running cobs in series with. So the case was running at half wattage for 3 months and i didnt even notice. Rewired them for a day or two and some tests, but still removed them for now.
The old setup ran at around 65 watts all total using a cheap plug in power meter, this new setup runs at 53w from that power meter, or right at 48w from multimeter values.
It’s still a downgrade from a lumens to watt ratio even with the inefficient ballasts, but i want to see and show what can be done with these cheap screw in leds bulbs, even if they are used in a dismantled form. As its a cheap easily sourced effective option in comparison.
Example the 4 vero 18’s and two ballast of my previous setup cost around $90usd with shipping. Four of these 14w Philips Screw-in led bulbs cost around $25 and were picked up locally at a big box store. Though they will be putting out less light in total, if end yield is the same in regards to lumens/watt consumed, it would take me between 8 to 10 cycles or 1.5-1.75 years to just break even as far as the original cost goes vs the added electricity cost of the slightly less efficient bulbs.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out.