Here's how i Did My Own

[Lapides]

very cool, that driver has the dimmer built in or can you add one? what about far red diodes mixed in, have you seen any strips like that?

That driver has a dimmer built in. There is another sub-model that you can add your own potentiometer.


To be honest, I'm not ready to hop on the far red bandwagon yet. As it is, these white LEDs by themselves knock off at least a week compared to HPS. Any more time shaved off I feel nervous the plant really isn't maturing. I have a plant that is absolutely DONE DONE in 56 days under these. I just can't imagine anything sooner and actually being dank as well.



Not to say I won't think about experimenting if I look into it all further.

 

[trichrider]

?
aren't white LEDs more like metal halides ?
i've flowered under MH before but convention has it that HPS are more flowering lights than MH. it's been a while since flowering with them.

just trying to get a grip on the sense of that. wouldn't far red be closer in temperature to HPS than white?
i'm not very good with electricity or the math involved in circuit design, so would i be better off buying off the shelf LED lights?

 

[Lapides]

i'm not very good with electricity or the math involved in circuit design, so would i be better off buying off the shelf LED lights?

If you aren't confident copying everything I posted in the first post, yeah you'll be better off buying something put together already.

 

[ledtime]

Lapides,

I just got done reading your grow logs and your posts on your lights. I've been away from this for ten years. My oh my how LED has evolved! I knew it would when I was designing LED lights for this back then. There was a guy...went by the name Weezard. Brilliant man in Hawaii. Taught me a ton!

I was just confirming that you are running your strips in parallel on a constant current driver? That driver is dimmable but I imagine you are running it full blast?

Just working through the math here. I know, the "fun" stuff, right? LOL

 

[Lapides]

Ok Im an idiot stoner.


ledtime - super sorry I never replied to this. The driver is being run full blast. I THINK it's a constant current. It's been over a year since I researched it all and put it together so I can't say for sure because i can't remember the difference between them all. The model number however is 100% correct.


Also, I saw in your thread you were given an option of watts per meter. That option was never given to me, so I did not list it in the specs in this tutorial. I do apologize for that. The strips I was supplied with were 20w/m.


These are meant to be cookie cutter plans and I didn't know the vendor was giving those sorts of options now. I hope nobody out there following this just guessed. And if they did I hope they guessed correctly.

 

[ledtime]

Glad my question could help fine tune the instruction!

I'm excited to see what this thing can do. It's very similar to your light in diode count, just has the diodes spaced differently (due to the 301B boards). They are about 2 inches wide by about 45 inches long on the heatsink. There are five lengths total. Equally spacing them across a 2' span there will be about 2.375" inches between each board.

That should give me some pretty even lighting over the entire 2x4 footprint. It will be finding the balance between height above the plants and how hard I run the driver. I really need a PPFD meter. Another $150 bucks at least for that though.