Wassup, I’m a cheap bastard and i know a lot of you are too. Here’s my grow hack for y’all, i ordered some 3000k lm301b 660nm panels for bulk price (about 50$ a board) and separate meanwell 350w drivers for 40$ a piece. Went to walmart and bought aluminum cookie sheets for heat transfer. Then i go down to the local recycle or garbage and look for thrown out vacuum and steam cleaners for wiring, this wiring is heavy duty but also bends easy. I slap everything together and you have 600w grow lights for about 100$ even each that grow just as well as any other samsung diode based light less than half of what you pay. Kush is my cologne and is stupid strong.
Thats some MacGyver shit. I’m going to have to give it a try.
Brother that’s wild. Do you have any pics or journals of anything grown under them. I want to be a believer.
I would keep an eye on your temps… cookie sheets are not designed to be heat sinks and won’t do anywhere near as good a job dissipating heat from the boards. Running the diodes too hot will ruin them or greatly reduce their life, so I would check your board temps and make sure you aren’t roasting your diodes.
I like the concept, but I worry about some of the materials being used. You can get a real heatsink for like $20, and some solid core wire for like $4. Seems like it would be worth spending a few bucks to make sure you have decent cooling and solid wiring.
I agree with Soup. Not nearly enough thermal mass. The cooler LED’s run, the more efficient they are. Running them cooler will also extend their life. You can look at the temperature graphs and see that as the junction heats up, the light output goes down. Good heat transfer is extremely important on LED lights. At the very minimum, point a fan directly at the back side of those if you are going to run them. But heat transfer might still be insufficient.
I would put some grommets between the wires and the thin aluminum sheet. Make sure your fire detector has a fresh battery.
…smoke detector
I am frugal not cheap so when I built mine I used all the top of the line parts including custom heat sinks designed specifically for the LM301B strips to run up to 1900mA and I run them at 1400mA.
Each light is 24×26″ with 800 diodes and 325w.
My space is 2.5 x 5 and the lights fit perfect wall to wall for very even coverage.
Even in late flower I rarely run them over about 500w and I am still getting 1300 PPFD
They run rather cool.
My cost was about $350 which while not dirt cheap are every bit as good as any light on the market costing 4x more.
I’ll always applaud an experimental mind. So, kudos.
I’m not as adventurous and prefer spending a little extra for piece of mind. I know that ultimately, I will be saving money over what I would spend buying all of my smoke.
Heavy piece of extruded aluminum heatsink, bunch of good LEDs, good thermal pad material, wire, LED holders, and driver…poof…grow light. I built mine a bit more complicated with water cooling so that I could divert the heat outside the room. Cost me $500 2 years ago. The cost for the LEDs and driver are now less than half the priced they were 2 years ago. This light runs so cool that I believe it will glow longer than I will, and I am probably maxing out the efficiency of the LEDs. 400 watts at the outlet, light output unknown. 20 LEDs. Mostly 3000K with a few 5000K and 2700K mixed in as this is both veg and bloom. Growing the dank.