diy grow light from 100w ebay cobs

Yup its been done before & no they ain't crees or vero nor citizen but its just for veg / experiment & my plants seem to like it.
2x generic 100W ebay COBS in parallel
1x generic 100w driver
2x passive radiator heatsink (from an old mac tower)
1x pvc electronics enclosure for the driver
1x computer fan
strips of scrap aluminum as brackets to hold it all together.

This cost me about $25- for the LEDs and driver, the rest I already had. Seems to be working far better than the 4 CFL & 2 LED bulbs that its replacing.

nice heatsinks

dankylarry said:

Yup its been done before & no they ain't crees or vero nor citizen but its just for veg / experiment & my plants seem to like it.
2x generic 100W ebay COBS in parallel
1x generic 100w driver
2x passive radiator heatsink (from an old mac tower)
1x pvc electronics enclosure for the driver
1x computer fan
strips of scrap aluminum as brackets to hold it all together.

This cost me about $25- for the LEDs and driver, the rest I already had. Seems to be working far better than the 4 CFL & 2 LED bulbs that its replacing.

Click to expand...

This is incredibly bad ass. One of the best budget builds I have seen. Did the CObs even have a name? Some Chinese deal but they look good.

Any pics of the plants? I would lover to see plant pictures in a few weeks. Nice job!

I started in cobs with the cheap white CN cobs. They do work great. I doubt the quality or efficiency is there (compared to quality name brands), but, the cost of learning and designing is really cheap when you aren't worried if you fry a <$10 cob vs a $40+ chip like a 3590.

I wouldn't do a whole room or grow with them, but, for small spaces (space buckets, totes, or supplemental) they work fine. A lot better than small CFLs, at much lower total wattage.

Do note, that smaller/more affodrable name brand cobs are available that will likely match the cheap CN cobs. My 700ma of (4) Vero 18 handles veg in a small space tote quite well. I got very spoiled by the MW drivers, and haven't setup my single cobs on my universal 24v power supply and individual driver boards since. It was just a messy setup running my early revisions. Not to say, you can't just run the cheap cobs on a MW driver.

I find 300w or bigger led chips are less hassle but a bit harder to get a good price on

Seen some 115w citizens for £40 for 5 on ebay might try them soon

the 150w AC direct cob leds I`ve been testing seem to match up to around 120w of dc cobs..... but they are more compact that`s for sure

Looking into some cheap 400w, 500w, 600w, 800w and 1000w dc cobs and smds....... that last 1000w/1200w SMD I got was around $160 posted...... think I`d rather use 2 to 4 DC cobs if they are under $100, or 4 to 8 of the 150w AC direct cobs, just cos the light is so much more compact..... that being said I can get 400w drivers for under £20 so I`m tempted to just build around them and go DC....... just running ac cobs makes putting an AC fan on the heaksink super easy instead of needing another powersupply for the fan

I`m liking 2700k, 3000k, 4000k and 5000k chips at the moment but I have been tempted to play with some 6000k, 10,000k and 12,000k ones...... but been finding 3000k`s good for mid flower and 5000k`s good for finish, kinda suspect I might settle on 3500k`s or 4000k`s for the whole process when I`ve built lights for a few more rooms out of some more shades of white


That thing looks good for a little budget set up

Hard thing I find when going bigger is finding a heatsink for a good price bigger than 150mm x 400mm, like 400mm x 400mm would be nice but the price starts going up

dankylarry said:

Yup its been done before & no they ain't crees or vero nor citizen but its just for veg / experiment & my plants seem to like it.
2x generic 100W ebay COBS in parallel
1x generic 100w driver
2x passive radiator heatsink (from an old mac tower)
1x pvc electronics enclosure for the driver
1x computer fan
strips of scrap aluminum as brackets to hold it all together.

This cost me about $25- for the LEDs and driver, the rest I already had. Seems to be working far better than the 4 CFL & 2 LED bulbs that its replacing.

Click to expand...

are those the cool white LEDs ? I only see 100watt cool white and warm white LEDs on ebay

its one cool white & one warm