DiY LED Grow Lights with CREE CXA3070 COBs and CPU Coolers

@epicfail

Many many thanks found everything...

Gadgetboy said:

@epicfail

Many many thanks found everything...

Click to expand...

Share what you found with us High quality high power monochrome LEDs could be an excelent addition to a garden.

For this friend of a friend's garden the goal is to get huge vegitative plants indoors so that they can be planted outdoors a week or so after the equinox. As such the focus is on 450nm blues (2x60W) and cool white 5000k (4x60W) for now. Hopefully this is enough. A 5' tall (or bigger) plant put into the ground in the spring should be quite impressive at the end of the summer.

This may need to go into another thread, but here are some thoughts about the monochrome and possibly high color temperature LEDs.

In nature a plant is triggered to go into flowering when it recieves red light at 12 hour intervals. The red light comes from the sun being filtered by the atmosphere at rise and set, and also sitting lower in the sky due to the tilt of the earth.

Since flowering is dependant upon the red spectrum light, would it make a difference to feed blue light to a plant 24hrs a day during flowering, or during the 12 dark hours of flowering. Even an ebay 50W unit run at 30W can put in an extra 12x30=360Wh of energy to the plant. That's not insignificant. Vegitatve growth during flowering may be a great thing, or a terrible thing. It may start as a great thing and end up a terrible thing too.

It is also not well known what blasting high power (nearly) pure red spectrum light for 12hrs/day does. 22hrs/day of pure red can make a vegging plant curl up like it wants to flower

When thinking of natural light sources the moon is often overlooked. The light from a full moon on a clear night is sometimes enough to read a book, so it is not unnoticed by plants. The light of the full moon in the sky is a 6000K color since it is essentially reflected sunlight. It may be possible to use LEDs with wide angle lenses to distribute the light to have a "harvest moon" every crop. It could also totally ruin the flowering cycle. Won't know until an a/b test is done.

It is also thought that waxing and waning moons influence seedling growth, flowering and all sorts of other aspects of plant development. If anyone is feeling adventureous or has wondered about these things LEDs give you the technology to do so and more.

If any of that is wrong, or has already been studied link the info please.

Anyway, time to go relax

My friends idea remains the same I have just managed to find similar led's but mounted to PCB's to allow manual soldering. I have also decided to more than double the amount. So i am using this OP's design but with the addition of 16 3W Luxeon deep red leds (http://shop.stevesleds.com/Philips-Luxeon-ES-Deep-Red-3-Watt-LEDs-Luxeon-ES-Deep-Red.htm) and 16 Luxeon Royal blue led's.(http://shop.stevesleds.com/Philips-Luxeon-ES-ROYAL-BLUE-3-Watt-LEDs-Luxeon-ES-Royal-Blue.htm) I will do a photo shoot of the assembly and update when complete. My friend has also agreed to do a photo log of the first couple of grows, one using the additional lights and one without to establish if a worthwhile addition

Have any studies been done on the best growing methods for LED? or is it just personal preference

Gadgetboy said:

Have any studies been done on the best growing methods for LED? or is it just personal preference

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Not seen any with the COB LEDs. The 3W and 5W diode arrays seemed to function well.

The aliexpress heat sink/fans came today. It is worth the extra $ for the name brand ones. The machine work on these is not good. I will be trying them with 60W diodes, but not with anything more.

Next place for cheap heat sink/fans will be taking a look at my local ecycler. They might even give me as many as I can take if I take apart rigs for them... Sometimes old desktop servers come in with crazy huge heat sinks. Add a high performance 100mm case fan and you can get rid of a lot of heat. I'm thinking about getting a projector and making a 200W (or more) LED bulb for it, so I'm either looking at a big ass heat sink and fan, or water cooling. Water cooled LED projector bulb, bad ass.

Not to take away from this thread but there is so much more info here that its worth trying to read what you can.
https://www.rollitup.org/t/diy-led-cree-cxa3070.789575/

Heatsinks from heatsinkusa.com is great @ $0.32 per inch of 2.8 wide heatsink.

I made one like this as wanted to dive in and get started and glad I did.

I am too thinking of adding to this light that is going to be for flower in 29sqft. Ive no idea yet what I will add as me=newb.

I have also now made another that will be for veg (30 vero 10s on 6 drivers (fiver vero10s in series/ 36w driver) running low amps over five 50" lengths of heatsinks welded together to make a 50"x36" lamp passively cooled. Just waiting on drivers (all parts linked above, click here for info from SurpraSPL that lead me to make this)





Lots of great options to make these but Cree and Vero seem to be the best or 2 of them at least. Not saying ebay and unknown manufactures on ali do not work also, but using proven products was the key for me knowing what I was building will work. Experimenting is great but I leave that to @SupraSPL and others.

But more DIYs like this help us all and thanks @Gaius and other helpfull contributors for making this thread as there is such an overload of info out there threads like these are great and is what lead me to this forum. Now lock this thread so it doesnt get longer than 10 pages! jk maybe

avnewb said:

Now lock this thread so it doesnt get longer than 10 pages! jk maybe

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I dont see the point in that? this thread is already 10 pages, How can a project evolve and technology advance if you put a cap on it?

Oh, I was just joking.
Just meant that I found this thread, was able to read the whole thing and ordered the stuff that night. If it was 150 pages I would still be reading it.
Ignore me. I was not sober when I wrote that.

Gaius said:

Easily build your own high-power LED Grow Light using COBs!

(Built with assistance of RIU contributors! - Original thread )


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Battlestar Ganjatica - A 480 Watt Multi-Mode LED Grow Light


6x CREE CXA3070 @ 3000K - $36ea ($216)

2x CREE CXA3070 @ 5000K - $38ea ($76)

8X Meanwell LPC-60-1400 Drivers - $20ea ($160)

8 Arctic Cool CPU Coolers - $9ea ($72)

Rhino 12v External HDD Power supply - $9 (for powering fans)

1 Tube Thermal Adhesive - $8

3'x1' White Shelving board - $10

4x Bottom Sliders for Drawers - $7ea ($2
(link is not exact model. I only paid $7 each in-store)

3x 2-way Switches - $4ea ($12)

4 heavy-duty stainless eye bolts - $1ea ($4) (in-store)

10 Pack In-sure easy wire connectors - $2

6-Pack Blue Mid-line connectors - $2

TOTAL PANEL BOM: $599

MISC Other Materials:

Ignore the fan-speed controller. Didn't end up using it.


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Wiring is pretty basic. Just scale up the below diagram (provided by RIU member Goud)

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And here you go!

3 Modes: Veg, Teen, Bloom

Preliminary Results look good!

First day over plants:

Week or so later:

​

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Are you still using this setup or have you made any upgrade ? if yes what parts have you upgrade?

Thanks In Advance.

Can anyone tell me will this Heatsink + Fan(details listed below) be ok to cool a Cree 3070 running on a meanwell 60-1400, so around 50watts.

Specifications Heatsink:

• Dimension: Approx. 90mm x 90mm x 25mm / 3.54 inch x 3.54 inch x 0.98 inch
• Speed: 2200±10% rpm
• Voltage: 12V DC
• Noise: 22 dBA
• Max. Wind: 48 CFM
• Color: Orange and Silver
• Efficient heat dissipation, low noise
• Usage lifetime: Approx. 30000hours
• Material: Plastic, Aluminum

zypheruk said:

Can anyone tell me will this Heatsink + Fan(details listed below) be ok to cool a Cree 3070 running on a meanwell 60-1400, so around 50watts.

Specifications Heatsink:

• Dimension: Approx. 90mm x 90mm x 25mm / 3.54 inch x 3.54 inch x 0.98 inch
• Speed: 2200±10% rpm
• Voltage: 12V DC
• Noise: 22 dBA
• Max. Wind: 48 CFM
• Color: Orange and Silver
• Efficient heat dissipation, low noise
• Usage lifetime: Approx. 30000hours
• Material: Plastic, Aluminum

Click to expand...

NO problem, more than enuf cooling there to handle your load

Dloomis514, thanks for the quick reply and confirmation.

Now to get 8 X of them on order and sketch up a panel to put them in. Like most DIY it's a work in progress. Currently running 2 x 3070's using the meanwells and the alpine cooler. These coolers listed work out at half the price of the alpines.

Cheers

Using the basic parts outlined in the first page of this post, I built a scaled down version of this light with some changes.
I mounted the leds to the heat sinks and stuffed them inside 3" pvc and use a blower to cool all 4 lights. The output of the blower is vented outside via some 2 1/2" flexible RV sewer hose so I'm killing 2 birds with that setup.
The whole shebang draws 208 watts at 115v and the temperature at each heat sink ranges from 135f to 95f with an ambient temperature of 75f. I'm using three of the 3000k chips ( http://www.mouser.com/Search/m_ProductDetail.aspx?R=CXA3070-0000-000N00Z450Fvirtualkey57280000virtualkey941-CXA30700N00Z450F) and one 5000k chip, so 240 watts. The drivers are https://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&langId=-1&productId=2101315&storeId=10001&krypto=vFgRhKXJZKuM8sLfuPRmxv3tw+Np1UpMVks4N7ZnwCWYZACeIoNBNA==&ddkey=https:StoreCatalogDrillDownView.
I realize this post is not very technical but I am posting from my phone and its hard to keep any continuity when all you can see is a tiny little text box. I'm 2 weeks into a grow and I've been documenting the progress which I will post when I'm a bit further along, but at this point, it is going much much better than I thought. My previous experience is with hps and soil, but I made some mistakes back then so my comparisons may not be very accurate.

Flyboy- cool idea. I dig your garden sprayer, as a side note!

If I were to mimic this build hut use CXA3590's instead of the 3070's would I need to use different drivers?

I'm not the guy to ask. There doesn't seem to be a single opinion on whether to under-power your led or use the rated wattage. The setup I'm using is slightly under driven which theoretically should extend the life of the chips. If I were to guess, I'd say you would need a bigger driver.
For what it's worth, I'm very happy with my setup. Two months from seed and 2 weeks into flowering my plant is 41" tall with nice sized buds. I thin out some of the lower fan leaves so the penetration is pretty good.
About 3 weeks ago I had an incident where my blower froze up. The leds overheated almost instantly to the point where some of the soldered leads fell off. Thankfully, I was home to shut it off but after putting it all back together, the light works fine.
With that in mind, you might consider a thermal shutoff or a 2nd fan.

The 3070's max power is 117W, 3590 is 150W.

60W/117W = .513 or 51.3%

51.3% of 150W is

.513 * 150W = 76.9W

If you could find an 80W driver the 3590 would probably be happy. You could probably push it to a full 90W or 100W. 4-6 of those at 100W a piece would be a really nice setup.

Not sure if anyone has tried a 3070 with a higher power driver, but I think it would be able to take 70-80W easily. I can't seem to find one that is reasonably priced. 80W would be a 33% increase B-D

I have a 144"x40" space I plan to run DWC and Scrog. Would 3 of these "ganjanticas" cover that space well? Should I add a string of 660's and if so, how many Per unit?

waltzNo2 said:

The 3070's max power is 117W, 3590 is 150W.

60W/117W = .513 or 51.3%

51.3% of 150W is

.513 * 150W = 76.9W

If you could find an 80W driver the 3590 would probably be happy. You could probably push it to a full 90W or 100W. 4-6 of those at 100W a piece would be a really nice setup.

Not sure if anyone has tried a 3070 with a higher power driver, but I think it would be able to take 70-80W easily. I can't seem to find one that is reasonably priced. 80W would be a 33% increase B-D

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I only just spotted this response but thank you very much! I have since figured this out but some of this basic information seems tricky to come by when your knowledge is limited like mine. I'm sure others will find this post useful as well. Cheers Uzzi

zypheruk said:

Can anyone tell me will this Heatsink + Fan(details listed below) be ok to cool a Cree 3070 running on a meanwell 60-1400, so around 50watts.

Specifications Heatsink:

• Dimension: Approx. 90mm x 90mm x 25mm / 3.54 inch x 3.54 inch x 0.98 inch
• Speed: 2200±10% rpm
• Voltage: 12V DC
• Noise: 22 dBA
• Max. Wind: 48 CFM
• Color: Orange and Silver
• Efficient heat dissipation, low noise
• Usage lifetime: Approx. 30000hours
• Material: Plastic, Aluminum

Click to expand...

I have those exact heat sinks on my 3070's dude. Works perfect but i bought 3 and only 2 of the fans worked. I just removed the fan and dodgy stuck another pc fan on top.. works fine man. Looks cool too haha