If you do not look at the efficiency of the strips and rather look at bang for buck for someone starting on a small budget and they have power available freely which they do not pay for then i think these strips will work great, like in my circumstances i do not pay for power.
I have a question what do you guys put inbetween the aluminium and the strips, heatsink paste? or heatsink glue or do you put it on just like that?
Thanks
Many of us me incl. use double sided thermal tape from e3ay/am4zon. The blueish one with 0,15 or 0,2mm thickness is strong enough to hold the strips in place. No screws are needed but you need to degrease/clean the c-channels with some alcohol. It's available from 5-50mm wide.
15mm-Adhesive-Performance-Thermally-Heatsink/dp/B0751GYD6N/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1532634148&sr=8-13&keywords=double+sided+thermal+tape
And about strips...
I thought two double row F-strips are cheaper or the same like three of this strips, no? 150lm/w compared against 130 is a lot. 40% vs. 47% effiency means you need more surface area to keep them cool. If it's only a few bucks more I would rather take two F-strips. You would need smaller C-channels to keep them cool enough which would probably make up for the difference.
Let's use a 300w fixture.. The one with 40% effiency(3x LT-VB24F) has 120PAR/w and would produce 180w of direct heat, the one with 47% effiency(2x LT-FB24B) would have 141PAR/w and 159w direct heat. That's not only 7% more light for almost the same money you also need smaller heatsinks. For F-strips you only need a 40x 40x 40mm c-channel, with LT-VB24F you would need 50x 40x 50mm c-channel to keep them in the same temp area.
Many of us have the same thoughts played through. But no matter how you look at it F-strips are really hard to beat. We're still talking about +260lm/$ at nom. current ... even after the last price increase.
If you run F-strips at 165w you would even get 412,5lm/$.
And at last, even if you dont pay for electricity 7% better effiency means 7% more bud... each harvest!
That sums up quickly and is worth a few bucks more...