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Lets Talk About Cheap LED's

doob

doob

Member
I would love a small LED fitting to do some mothers occasionally, and I can see that one day I will rock LED lighting fully. But the LED market is worse than the seed breeders, marketing, lies and scams. Respect to those willing to put the research and money into it though.

But wattage lies, lumens which plants dont use, and they expect me to believe the hours they claim they last haha. Its a market i really dont want to rush into thats for sure. They should probably be really cheap as well?
 
C

Chompie

Member
Yeah the real deal commercial LED lights that are available are pretty pricey, and the cheapo ones... you get what you pay for and much less from what I've seen...

Besides needing the tools to build them, premium component fixtures can be DIY'd for much less though. The biggest issue with building your own is wading through all the mucky muck out there and figuring out a design that's going to work for your space...

I'm pretty happy with the chinese chip LED setup I have going on in my little space, but we'll see how long they last...

If I were going to go bigger I'd probably go back to HID for bloom now and keep the LED's for veg. I really love them in my veg cab.... I used to use twice as much wattage in veg with cfl's and get no where near the effective light spread as the 4x100W chips using a 60W driver...
 
Dion

Dion

Active member
i also agree there are not too many options to buy led with proper components for a reasonable price

this year there have been a few companies in the usa but nobody is doing it in europe....

yet =D this will change soon
 
G

Go Banana

New member
Hey Chompie, how's flowering going and how are the chips holding up? I would love to hear an update from you.

I'm just about to do a scrog and run 20x 100w chips @ 650mAh each (+ a single 50w full spectrum @ 1400mAh), in the same size space as you. With chips today at $2, it's a fun cheap experiment and so far looks like your kickn' ass . Glad I found this thread.







^^^ China panel makers would label it a "2050 watt grow light" :laughing:

Also NLfanatic has a good question about the full spectrum chips that are flooding fleabay. Not so many experiments on them yet. Would love to hear from ANYONE who has tested or played with em.

Thanks for sharing your setup man!
 
K

Killkingkong

Active member
Cool thread, I'm surprised I didn't see it earlier. I've been playing around with LEDs for a few years now and when I first started buying cobs I bought the expensive ones from mouser for over $60+ just for the cob alone. After some experimenting with cheaper $10 chinese cobs from amazon prize I became confident in them and recently bought a 10 pack of 100w (rated) cobs for $26.50 on ebay and made a pretty cool 70w 10 cob fixture for $68 (including all parts (screws/driver/heatsink/thermal paste). if you want it to run it at 100w instead add about $15. I'm using my light on a micro scale and at 50w (completely cool to the touch) and with underside lighting but I think if someone built a few of these lights and ran them at maybe 100w they could be pretty useful in bigger grows.

Design:


In action:
 
S

Safe Gardener

Active member
Nice light KillKingKong, what are you using for a heatsink and how under driven are the China COB's that you are using? It looks to be doing a great job!!
 
K

Killkingkong

Active member
Safe Gardener said:
Nice light KillKingKong, what are you using for a heatsink and how under driven are the China COB's that you are using? It looks to be doing a great job!!
Click to expand...

right now I'm running the light at 50w and all in parallel, so 5w each. I think 70w-100w would be fine in a larger grow, but I have mine in a PC. I want to make another one to put in another PC with 5 solo LEDs and then take those LEDs to use as underside lighting.

heatsink right after drilling holes:
 
W

Well

Member
Thank you all for this thread, i actually just bought a cheap 150 Watt Ufo light, my economy didn't allow more right now. But later on m gonna get a better unit. This cheap thing has not arrived yet do, so i can't call it bad just yet, but i don't expect it to be awesome, but its better then not have a light to grow under at al.
And the cops raided me and took my hps a few months back :(
 
K

Killkingkong

Active member
G

Go Banana

New member
Good job Killkingkong, nice to see these cheapies in action. Have you had a full grow under these ww chips yet? It would be so cool if you (this goes to anyone using generic cobs) started a thread dedicated to your pc grow!! Thanks for your input, Kkk.
 
K

Killkingkong

Active member
Go Banana said:
Good job Killkingkong, nice to see these cheapies in action. Have you had a full grow under these ww chips yet? It would be so cool if you (this goes to anyone using generic cobs) started a thread dedicated to your pc grow!! Thanks for your input, Kkk.
Click to expand...

I started playing around with screw in LEDs over 2 years ago, then expensive cobs and now tons and tons of cheap cobs. I've had a few harvest with cheap LEDs in my computers, but no more than 3 LEDs. This is my first run with this many LEDs and I'm pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to get some quality genetics again instead of bag seed to compliment this light.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=277874
 
S

StrictlyHerb

Member
heya!
In one grow i've used a 250w hps together with a 90w UFO led (atleast they said it was UFO where i bought it).
After that grow i didnt use the LED for some reasons.
What i remember from that grow when i was using my LED was that the flowers smelled and tasted AMAZING, i dunno if LED's alone will work efficiently, but damn: they will make some good tasty buds!
 
C

Chompie

Member
Go Banana said:
Hey Chompie, how's flowering going and how are the chips holding up? I would love to hear an update from you.

I'm just about to do a scrog and run 20x 100w chips @ 650mAh each (+ a single 50w full spectrum @ 1400mAh), in the same size space as you. With chips today at $2, it's a fun cheap experiment and so far looks like your kickn' ass . Glad I found this thread.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/attachment.php?attachmentid=356602View Image





^^^ China panel makers would label it a "2050 watt grow light" :laughing:

Also NLfanatic has a good question about the full spectrum chips that are flooding fleabay. Not so many experiments on them yet. Would love to hear from ANYONE who has tested or played with em.

Thanks for sharing your setup man!
Click to expand...

Well 2 years later and my cheap LED's are still going strong. I haven't changed out one chip since I installed all 100W chips. There are very few dead LED's, maybe 10 total in my whole grow.

I was consistently harvesting over 1g/w with this setup with very little training, but I recently setup a scrog screen and yield has increased a bit more.

The best I've hit was 1.5g/w with DNA's Chocolate Kush and Florida Lemons in a few different grows.

Scrog is definitely the way to go with these lights. I'm still more than happy with them and have no plans to change anything really. If you're a DIY type of person, these are a great way to get started into LED's imo...
 
M

Mr Pyr0

Member
Chompie said:
Well 2 years later and my cheap LED's are still going strong. I haven't changed out one chip since I installed all 100W chips. There are very few dead LED's, maybe 10 total in my whole grow.

I was consistently harvesting over 1g/w with this setup with very little training, but I recently setup a scrog screen and yield has increased a bit more.

The best I've hit was 1.5g/w with DNA's Chocolate Kush and Florida Lemons in a few different grows.

Scrog is definitely the way to go with these lights. I'm still more than happy with them and have no plans to change anything really. If you're a DIY type of person, these are a great way to get started into LED's imo...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update, that's good to know. I've got 4 of those cheap cobs and a spare 50W and 70W driver, I'm going to play around running them in parallel and see how they go. I'm just finishing a new small grow space and might just try them out.

:)
 
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