DIY leds Discussion Thread for all your how tos and doubts and anything related

[Rocket Soul]

Yea, it gets easier with practice but a single unit just has no economy of scale. To that day and a half add research/calculations to know what you want and then half a day of troubleshooting after it's done.

I got myself a GLA. Couldn't have done it better myself since good UV diodes are difficult to source.

Do you know where to source good 400 nm (ish) UV diodes (bare, not mounted)? I contemplate to DIY something for my fish tank.


At my scale I'm not sure if 3 % are really worth pursuing. Stop using seeds and "pheno hunt" myself a productive strain would be a better payoff. Or many other things I didn't optimize yet.

Theres stuff on alibaba and aliexpress that id rate as good enough. Talked about it with pcbuds the other day: https://www.icmag.com/threads/pcbuds-mini-grow.360815/post-18794714

Not allowed to give links to any of the alibubbers but if you look around aliexpress you almost find any nm, both mounted and unmounted. Modern uvs are mostly good enough.
The regular global distrubtors would work well: digikey, arrow electronics, mouser
I usually do alibaba but rhats like atleast 30$ in shipping so not worth it for a small order; hence aliexpress. TME in europe carries prolightopto who are very good aswell, and a bunch of cheapo brands.
GLA are excellent, strips or boards? We got the strips and been very happy with them. Have two other light fixtures with similar spectrum which also do well and me and my growbuddy never seem to agree which ones is best; sometimes it depends on the strain.

3% was just a number drawn thru the air, what you could get by optimizing spread in a ways you dont get with standard lighting.