Ming & Ben 50w Full-Spectrum COB LED's Who's Growing With Them?

[Douglas.Curtis]

They're available in 20w, 30w and 50w, and I'm working with the 30w and 50w. 50w full-spectrum first.

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My goal is a 100w Micro-Cab, using 2 50w COBS. So to work out the dimensions I'm looking for optimal growing distances from the 50w cobs.

• How far away can a flower be and not grow a stem reaching for more light?
• How close can these be to a flower and still produce decently dense cannabis, not super small/rock-hard flowers?

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I haven't soldered anything in nearly 40 years, lol. Glad to see I can still make it work, even with a cruddy cheap iron.

 

[Koondense]

If your cab is small and you have many cobs, i would recomend to drive them with half power, a 50w cob with a 25-35w driver. They will last longer, get less hot and will have a higher efficency. So instead of 2x50w could be a 4x25w setup.
Just thinking...

Cheers

 

[f-e]

I used 4 50s to show myself they worked, but only ran them once in veg. The action started at about 250mm away. I reckon 180mm about right.

They are about 80lm/w while the 14w gls lamps around 110lm/w. The microgrow thread with them had a good post in the last day or so, showing the 14w lamps ability with a light meter. 100mm was optimum. These 50w ones are 3 times bigger, and a tad hotter. Without doing the math, that about what I'm saying in the first paragraph.

Consider this 80lm/w figure carefully. A £10 citizen 1212 running at 50w will be about as bright. It's 150lm/w. The Samsung strips are making moves in the market though, with figures like 190lm/w. You won't be happy with 80lm/w for long. Not when you can half your power consumption and heat. Which means they will pay for themselves in electricity savings fairly soon. Might make a grow work that's too hot otherwise. While doing your bit for the environment.

If your home uses aircon, you save the electric twice.

Thus, I ran them once then moved on. Keeping they for emergency and amenity lighting.


Edit: They switch on about 15% over power, then regulate down as the chips are thermally sensitive. I had them on passive heatsinks, that I added cooling to. They would stay over 45w

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

If your cab is small and you have many cobs, i would recomend to drive them with half power, a 50w cob with a 25-35w driver. They will last longer, get less hot and will have a higher efficency. So instead of 2x50w could be a 4x25w setup.
Just thinking...

Cheers

Appreciate it, but these have built in drivers and are non-dimmable. Super simple to wire up though.


f-e, that's awesome information, thank you so much. At this point they're ultra cheap for me to pick up, don't require drivers, and have other uses besides cannabis. Right now one of my most limiting factors is up-front costs on equipment.

I'm definitely interested in the Samsung strips, I've been watching them for a while. Definitely awesome stuff. Thanks again.

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

Doing a little more digging on these chips...

Full-spectrum cobs are listed as 380-780nm, no lumen/watt rating
Warm-White cobs are 2800-3200K (nice for flowering) and 100l/watt
Cold-White cobs are 5500K - 7000K (definite veg spectrum) and 100l/watt
Still have not found the spectrum listing for the Neutral-White cobs.

I'm tempted to combine a 50w full spectrum and a 30w warm white, for the first test box. I have no experience with the full-spectrum chips, but I have flowered under 2700K SILs with decent results.

I'm wondering if the full-spectrum is more effective, or if adding warm-white would be helpful to flowering.

Makes me wish I'd spent more time reading on this the last year. Tip: Getting sued by people who are psychotic (my opinion) can drastically reduce your time in life. Get everything in writing, especially get gift receipts and put verbal agreements down on paper. lol Lesson learned.

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

These are dimmable! I've run across several reports now they dim just fine. This means longer life, lower heat and more options. Thank you Koondense, I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned it.

I've started an LED water cooling thread over here... The plan currently is to use dimmed combinations of Full and warm-white chips, mounted to a water cooled aluminum channel. I'm looking for ideas on useful things to do with the heat from the water, before running it through a cooler/radiator/coil to cool it. Orchids? lol

The last of my cobs have arrived from china!!

 

[Northernhemis]

Kool ive ordererd something similar with built in driver in the chip 50w fullspectrum and cool white 6500k also with built in driver , Dirt Cheap i must say but im not building them in a box seen some clips about these chips and they get silly warm without active cooling so its going to be for vegetables jalapenos and tomatoes . fan cooled aluminium bottompiece you can even buy them with a lens why you need that have no idea perhaps for the splashing risk (the chips are waterproof) hope you get them up and running dude !

 

[f-e]

They are in most floodlights we see at the DIY store.
This might interest you https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-SUNO...307267?hash=item3ff1e5c683:g:kJMAAOSw8rdf-MYt

A bit of heatsink plaster or even thermal epoxy and you're away.