Seeking Help - Building Custom-Designed DIY LED Grow Lights using CREE CXA3070 COBs

Gaius said:

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i fucken love new DIY LED gears!

anomuumi said:

Cool project! I like the idea of those veg units, with light traps those could sit in the corner of a flowering space too.

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That is exactly the plan. I didn't want to divide my room up, so these bins will provide an easy solution. When I was shopping around for cabinets, I couldn't find anything the right size or price. That led me to the bin idea.

These light traps you speak of... ..Know where I can find em? I was thinking of using those black charcoal HVAC filters you sometimes see at Home Depot.

That or I'll just jerry-rig some ducting with right angles.

Nice pile of goods!

SupraSPL said:

Nice pile of goods!

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That's what she said!


Here's a teaser photo of the new build in progress.



Still a lot of work to do....

So to wire these drivers up, do I just run all the red wires together to the red wire of a wall plug cord, then the do same with the blacks? Can a single cord handle all 9 drivers?

I'm thinking to just cut the female end off a PC power cord and then splice the all the drivers to it. Perhaps there is a little piece of hardware that will help with this. Heading to Fry's now to see what I find.

I can see those drivers have stickers on them but can't read the details. What do they say for input amps? If I remember correctly most wall outlets are good for 15+ A but after that things might get dicey. At the least you may have to spread the loads across two cords. At worst you may have to get on two circuits that have their own breakers.

That's in the US of A, where your standard breaker is 20A and you want to avoid loading up any one circuit past 80%.

If combined draw is 6 or 7A you should be OK, depending on what else is on that circuit. If you're thinking about wiring a bunch of loose wires together you might want to buy a junction box, some wire nuts, and some wire clamps for the holes that you drill in the box.

Just make sure you run the correct polarity otherwise you could get residual glow during lights out. The small hole in the outlet is usually the hot wire and the large hole is usually the neutral. You can test this with your multimeter by checking the voltage of each hole against the ground to see which one has voltage. The drivers should be marked L and N, brown is line blue is neutral.

When you are hooking up a lot of drivers it might be handy to have the ability to turn certain ones off or to swap them out so I use slide connectors. Also it might help to use strip terminals or similar to distribute the power in a secure and safe way. I used these from elecdirect.

Just picked up some mid-line connectors.



I've used these in car stereo installations, and figured they'd be great for connecting all the driver wires to the wall plug cord.

I'll probably just run all 8 drivers to a single plug. 8 of the Meanwell 1400mA drivers pulls ~11.2A, right? Guessing a single plug can handle it since it's less wattage than the 1000w HPS I previously ran in there, but I could be wrong. Not sure how these CC drivers add up current.

They tend to have a massive inrush current, but after a few milliseconds start drawing fuck all. At some point - 10 drivers? 100 drivers? - it could become a problem.

Another idea if you want a removable power cord and would like a fuse - go IEC + fuseholder. A nice page on them - http://www.ampmaker.com/store/Integrated-IEC-and-fuseholder.html

Following along. Anyone have a good/inexpensive source for Meanwell parts? I found the LPC-60-1400 on Ebay from China. I don't mind going the China route, but would prefer US.

WDIK said:

Following along. Anyone have a good/inexpensive source for Meanwell parts? I found the LPC-60-1400 on Ebay from China. I don't mind going the China route, but would prefer US.

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http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?search_type=jamecoall&catalogId=10001&freeText=LPC-60-1400&langId=-1&productId=2101315&storeId=10001&ddkey=http:StoreCatalogDrillDownView

I'm going to be picking some of these up myself.

Introducing Baltar's BudBin!

Custom-made 60 watt Vegging "cabinet" for <$140

Awesome build! That little chamber looks awesome. Do you have anything that clamps the two totes together?

There is a rubber gasket which holds them together by friction, however I plan to make some little tabs that will hold it more securely.

Still need to make light traps for it as well.

Sweet grow box! To give you fair warning, if there is any way to separate that from your flower area it will save you untold trouble (hermies, delayed flowering, revegging during flowering). To truly test that darkness of your flower room you can either hang out in the dark for 10-20 mins if you have the patience or wear an eye patch for 20 minutes while you get stuff done and then you can really see every spec or glow of light. Granted some plants are more sensitive than others.

I have to deal with this because my 4 tents are all connected by large passive airways that also serve as light traps and consequently I get a very slight glow on the floor. The more I switch to LED the better it gets because HPS flings light everywhere and LED puts it right in the canopy.

Of course. This won't go into flower room until the light traps are built.

I was just thinking itd be impossible to stop that glow, but on the other hand we can never underestimate the ingenuity of pot growers

You can see in the photos that the top bin is lined with reflective foil tape which prevents any glowing from the plastic bin. The bottom bin will receive this treatment too.

In the end it'll be nearly 100% light proof.

Yea I like the foil tape job. I made a veg box from a rolling plastic garbage can and painted the inside flat white. Of course over time the paint flaked off and was a pita, the foil tape seems like itd work much better.

I was referring to the fan holes and intake holes creating a glow. I figured itd be very hard to stop that without closing them up.

SupraSPL said:

I was referring to the fan holes and intake holes creating a glow. I figured itd be very hard to stop that without closing them up.

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Shouldn't be that difficult (I'm hoping).

The trick is to add as many right angles as you can without impeding the airflow too much. I have a cool idea for the bottom bin which involves adding a 3rd bin (another $13) with some holes in the bottom, and some strategic use of that black rubber gasket tape. For the top bin, I plan to Jerry-rig some 8" ducting to each fan and put a couple bends in the tubes.

The Bubba Kush teens you see in the BudBin have been on 12/12 from seed, and have just shown their first pistols. I'm now putting these under 24/7 for a week to get them reverting back to veg. The strongest of the 4 in there will become my new mother, and it'll receive an 18/6 lighting schedule after that first week. Basically, I have a week from today to figure out my light-trapping method.