Close. You left out “resistance” I think. One watt of resistance will create the same amount of heat no matter the source/circuit. In an electric light, watts turn into photons (light) and heat. The better the light is at turning watts into photons (efficiency), the less heat it will produce per watt consumed. A 30% efficient light will turn 70% of its power into heat, but a 50% efficient light will only convert 50% of those watts into heat.
More efficient lights produce less heat, period. They are not all the same.
I would agree generally about “cheap” LED. Cheap generic COBs aren’t much more efficient than CFLs and HPS. But even cheap generic Chinese COBs will replace 200w of HID and grow better bud over the given canopy area, without light movers or 12 inches of vertical profile to devote to hanging a reflector. That matters for a lot of 200w cabinet growers. Cheap white 50w COBs are about $1 on Ebay, drivers are less than 20 cents/watt. But cheap is cheap, whether COBs or HID.
Here’s the basic efficiency ranges of different lamp techs:
Incandescents: 17 lumens/watt
Mercury vapor: 45-50 lumens/watt
Fluorescents: 60-70 lumens/watt
Metal halide: 90 lumens/watt
High pressure sodium: 107 lumens/watt
Lose cheap as the first priority and the efficiency gap widens dramatically between HPS and LED. The Samsung chips in SolStrips have efficiencies in the range of 187-212 lumens/watt depending on how hard they are driven. That’s close to 2x the efficiency of HPS. Add the fact that all the light produced by an LED is emitted in a 120 degree cone aimed directly at the canopy, rather than a 360 degree sphere where 2/3 of the photons have to be reflected back and through the bulb before they get the chance to hit a leaf, and the efficiencies of LED over HID start to become clear, especially compared to smaller wattage HID.
Bottom line, with modern, better quality LED, you use far less watts to produce the same amount of light-on-leaves than HID, and you use those watts twice as efficiently. Less watts total equals less heat, and watts used far more efficiently equals far less waste heat.
Photon for photon, LEDs create far less waste heat than HID, hands down. It’s not even close.
lol yes because mars hydro/viparspectra and best used in a sentence about LEDs would be something like
'mars hydro and viparspectra are the best LEDs to avoid"
@Baudelaire thanks for clarifying that, so heat = power consumption - light emitted
I also vote for DIY if you’re up to the task as it is cheaper. That is what I have done. I recently bought 9 Cree CXA 3050 100W cobs for only $1.80 a piece, it was the last 9 they had unfortunately or I would have bought more of them at that cost they are a little older and have been replace by the CXB which is more efficient but still at that cost one can’t lose .
My point is if you search you can find parts on the cheap. I also use old pc printer power supplies for drivers as a lot of them can be found that are 31-36 volts that will work perfect as drivers for cobs and can be gotten for cheap… So for $18 I got essentially 450-500w worth of cob lights if I run them at around 50w to make them more efficient than if ran at 100w which is around 165lm per watt… Then you also just use old pc cpu coolers for the cobs to save even more money.
optics are extremely overpriced imo, i’m pretty sure they are rebranded sunplus LEDs for twice the price. you are much better off building your own. here is a 3 cob kit using same CXB 3590’s and 5x the wattage for only $20 more
edit: it’s only $20 more than the optic 1 sale price, it’s $30 less than the regular price lmao
No, an Alibaba distributor. He has been around for a while, several of the LED guys in RIU have dealt with him. I looked into it when building my lamps, but ended up buying from Arrow / Cobkits / Rapidled / HLG.
@casperdeigh I am with Pookie on this one. My 3500k COBs grew beautiful lush plants and dense nugs. Now I´m running 3000k for flowering, but I believe they would veg just fine as well.
You are in luck if you have Cutter so close. I would ask them, they have good customer service, and even gave me info once without actually being looking into buying anything.
In your situation I would go with 3500k cobs. Last time I looked into COBs, months ago, the Luminus CXM 22 appeared to be the best bang for the buck. I use Cree CXB 3590s, but their price is still high while other competitors have come with more cost effective options. Check out what Cutter has in stock and go with that.
An alternative would be LED strips, if I remember correctly Cutter has been producing some, and even custom spectrum COBs. If you can run them without heatsinks you would save money on heatsinks.
About converting the old lamp I don´t know. If it has puny little heatsinks, they are not probably good for much. Seems like a fun project, more so with Growmau5 “assistance”, but you probably won´t save a lot of money going that way.
The other thing you have to look into is the driver (if the one in the mars does not work). Meanwells are rather expensive, but their HLG drivers are solid and I believe a de facto standard in these LED DIY setups. Check the link below to pair LEDs and drivers. For example, a HLG-480H-C1400 can drive 6 of those CXM 22 up to about 450w, which would kill it in your tent (you would likely have to dim them). I like the “B” versions better, to run the dimmers remotely or pair them with a light controller.
