Modifying Old Blurples for Greater Efficiency...

is it possible to modify old blurples for greater efficiency? would it be worth it?...

I first started experimenting with led grow lights back in 2010, so needless to say, I've accumulated some blurples over the years, including
- 1 hydro grow 336X pro (2010) - 500W, 16 modules, 336x3W leds
- 1 fero apollo 10 (2011) - 450W, 10 modules, 150x3W leds
- 2 lush dominator 2Xs (2014) - 435W, 200x3W leds
- 2 sublime illuminations monster 16s (2014) - 750W, 400x3W leds

knowing what I know now, these lights (and the companies I bought them from) seem like a total joke, but the truth is I've grown some seriously amazing herb with them nonetheless...

their various spectrums (combined with good growing skills of course) have actually always produced dense, super frosty, colorful, flavorful, aromatic buds; their main drawback has really just been poor efficiency.. they don't produce much less heat than hps of similar wattage, which was the whole point of switching to led in the first place...

I've always wished they had dimmers because they are way brighter than they need to be (any closer than 18" results in bleached tips), meaning I have to hang them far away from the plants and a lot of the waste heat they produce is totally unnecessary.. if they could be run softer, they could be hung closer to the plants, and of course they'd use less power and produce less heat..

I've replaced the two oldest lights (the 336x pro and the apollo 10) with quantum boards, but I'm still using the lush lights and the monster 16s for now.. the plants really do love the spectrum...

I'm wondering if it's possible to modify these lights somehow to run softer/more efficiently...

thoughts?

why not just rewire them to cut current in half? where you have 2 drivers yank them and replace with one driver driving both circuits in parallel

Hi,

You need to replace the drivers against dimmable drivers eg. from Meanwell.

Open the case and remove one driver, if necessary, to read the specifications. Often 100v / 600mA drivers are used in these lamps.

When you find the voltage of the installed LED modules, you can use a driver with half the current to halve the output. This makes them more efficient at the same time.

For instance, if one module have 15 3w led's, 10red + 5blue in series and they get 600mA from the driver the vf should be between 35 and 40v(<2,5v red/~3v blue).

In this case one 100v/600mA driver would drive two of these modules in series.

I don't know the specs of your lamps but with a cheap multimeter you should be able to figure out how much vf each module needs. If you know this it is easy to find a matching dimmable driver to power all the modules in one lamp in once. If we use the estimated 35-40vf per module and there are 6 modules you could use a HLG-80H-C350B(up to 257vf/350mA) to drive all modules in series but with only 350mA instead of 600mA and dimmable.

CobKits said:

why not just rewire them to cut current in half? where you have 2 drivers yank them and replace with one driver driving both circuits in parallel

Click to expand...

Hehe, for sure the cheaper solution... and you have a few spare drivers for other projects..

You will need to do more tricky 'smd' soldering but this is a blurple to white cob conversion I did on a spider cob knockoff-

CobKits said:

why not just rewire them to cut current in half? where you have 2 drivers yank them and replace with one driver driving both circuits in parallel

Click to expand...

I like this idea a lot. simple, free, and it will give me extra drivers to play with.. I think I'm going to try it

ganjamystic said:

I like this idea a lot. simple, free, and it will give me extra drivers to play with.. I think I'm going to try it

Click to expand...

That build of mine had drivers with half the drive current I needed and double the voltage so I ended up rigging pairs of drivers in parallel then driving pairs of cobs in series. as they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat!

ok. finally getting around to messing with this idea a little.. decided to open up the apollo 10 first, since it's one I'm not currently using and haven't used for several cycles now... it has 10 led modules, each consisting of 15 x 3w leds (supposedly "450W" total.. probably not actually.. but I forgot to plug it into the meter before I started taking it apart.. oops) of various colors (supposedly "380-730nm".. looks like deep red?, red, blue, orange, violet?... anyway doesn't really matter.. this is just an experiment for fun. I just want to run this thing softer for an efficiency boost and use it to supplement some white led and see if there's any noticeable bump in quality or yield...). the modules are mounted on 2 linear heatsinks, 5 modules per bar. there are 5 drivers, unbranded but labeled 32-42V 1420mA. each driver is connected to 2 modules, and all the drivers are connected together, controlled by a single on/off switch...

so... where do I go from here? I'm guessing these drivers aren't as efficient as meanwells, so I'm thinking I could just get a single meanwell to drive all 10 modules (and keep these no name drivers for future projects or just sell them on ebay or something..). what driver would I need to replace five 32-42V 1420mA drivers if I want to run the whole thing a little softer on max power? sorry, I'm not quite competent enough to figure this out myself yet, but I will try to follow along if someone can explain...

ALSO, how do I upload pics from an iphone?? it seems I can only insert an image with a URL... where do you peeps upload pics online (discreetly) so that you can post them in your threads?

oh I think I'm also going to ditch the case and fans btw. these heatsinks look like they'd work for passive cooling if they weren't hotboxed inside a steel case, especially with the leds running softer...

ganjamystic said:

ok. finally getting around to messing with this idea a little.. decided to open up the apollo 10 first, since it's one I'm not currently using and haven't used for several cycles now... it has 10 led modules, each consisting of 15 x 3w leds (supposedly "450W" total.. probably not actually.. but I forgot to plug it into the meter before I started taking it apart.. oops) of various colors (supposedly "380-730nm".. looks like deep red?, red, blue, orange, violet?... anyway doesn't really matter.. this is just an experiment for fun. I just want to run this thing softer for an efficiency boost and use it to supplement some white led and see if there's any noticeable bump in quality or yield...). the modules are mounted on 2 linear heatsinks, 5 modules per bar. there are 5 drivers, unbranded but labeled 32-42V 1420mA. each driver is connected to 2 modules, and all the drivers are connected together, controlled by a single on/off switch...

so... where do I go from here? I'm guessing these drivers aren't as efficient as meanwells, so I'm thinking I could just get a single meanwell to drive all 10 modules (and keep these no name drivers for future projects or just sell them on ebay or something..). what driver would I need to replace five 32-42V 1420mA drivers if I want to run the whole thing a little softer on max power? sorry, I'm not quite competent enough to figure this out myself yet, but I will try to follow along if someone can explain...

ALSO, how do I upload pics from an iphone?? it seems I can only insert an image with a URL... where do you peeps upload pics online (discreetly) so that you can post them in your threads?

Click to expand...

Well your driver output is a known value, so we can take 5 x 42v x 1.4a and get 294w which will be its real output (input will be a percentage multiple of that number most likely around 90% efficient so 10% more power from the wall = 324w) for the added expense of slightly more efficient drivers you will have a repayment time in saved leccy bills of around 5 years!! (29w = 0.029kw x 12hrs = 1/3rd of a kwh per day, or about 5 cents) So with 5 x 42v x 1400mA to play with your choices are a little limited, either drive 5 x 60w CoB's or 10 x 30w, 10 vero 19's would be real nice or the luxeon 1211's in that vid of mine, they respond better to being underdriven than the vero's do. And sod discreet, i'm old, fuckem!

Randomblame said:

Hi,

You need to replace the drivers against dimmable drivers eg. from Meanwell.

Open the case and remove one driver, if necessary, to read the specifications. Often 100v / 600mA drivers are used in these lamps.

When you find the voltage of the installed LED modules, you can use a driver with half the current to halve the output. This makes them more efficient at the same time.

For instance, if one module have 15 3w led's, 10red + 5blue in series and they get 600mA from the driver the vf should be between 35 and 40v(<2,5v red/~3v blue).

In this case one 100v/600mA driver would drive two of these modules in series.

I don't know the specs of your lamps but with a cheap multimeter you should be able to figure out how much vf each module needs. If you know this it is easy to find a matching dimmable driver to power all the modules in one lamp in once. If we use the estimated 35-40vf per module and there are 6 modules you could use a HLG-80H-C350B(up to 257vf/350mA) to drive all modules in series but with only 350mA instead of 600mA and dimmable.

Click to expand...

ok so the 10 modules were running on five 32-42V 1420mA drivers... each driver was connected to 2 modules and all the drivers were connected to each other... what does that tell me? lol does that mean each module is 32-42V? or 16-21V? would one HLG-240H-C700 run all 10 modules at about half the current?

seriously though, what's the best way to upload pics?

Don't bother replacing the drivers, those are just fine.

You can replace the light units with cobs, or just run them with whatever - you have around 320w to play with.

Photon Flinger said:

Don't bother replacing the drivers, those are just fine.

You can replace the light units with cobs, or just run them with whatever - you have around 320w to play with.

Click to expand...

I definitely don't want to replace the led modules with cobs... this whole experiment is based on trying to make use of the colored leds from my old blurple lights rather than just throwing them out or selling them... these blurple lights have always grown great quality bud, but they just aren't very efficient.. as in they still produce a fair amount of heat... but they are also driven super hard as is. they are bright as hell.. you can't put plants any closer than like 18" without bleaching. so my thought was I could drive them soft instead, allowing me to hang them close, and use them to supplement some all-white led (qbs or 154lm/w ebay strips)... I can already tell looking at my qb lights and the blurples I still use (which have white diodes in addition to red, blue, violet, etc) hanging side by side, that (surprisingly) I actually prefer the white/purple spectrum of the old blurples to the all-white one of the qbs (which looks really yellow in comparison)... it could be in my head, but the plants in the purple-ish light seem to be developing more early frost and just generally look a little bit happier... so I'm trying to make use of all these colored modules if I can...

so... can I run all 10 modules using fewer of the original drivers to drive them softer? before, each of the 5 drivers was running 2 modules (I think).. so it seems like the only other option with these drivers would be to use only 2 drivers and run 5 modules per driver (I'm not sure how I could use 3 or 4 drivers to run 10 modules.. is that possible somehow?)... but would that work? could one of these 32-42V 1420mA drivers run 5 modules in series, or would that be too much Vf for one driver? how do I know if these drivers are constant voltage or constant current?....

can someone please help me understand what the original way these were wired tells me... 5 drivers, each labeled 32-42V 1420mA, each with two connections coming out of the DC side, connected to 2 modules... does this mean each module was originally running at 16-21V 1420mA or that each module was running at 32-42V 710mA?... sorry if these are stupid questions... I'm really trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of all this but wow... it's a learning process for sure....

and again, this would all be easier to explain, and the thread would be a lot more interesting, if I could upload pics... so if someone can help me out with that too, that would be awesome!

You can run 4 per driver wired in parallel. Or 5 per driver which gets you down to 2 drivers with 3 spares. Then you can hang them anywhere as heat will be negligible.

The blurple hate is strong here. They do kick butt for smaller plants and leafy greens, especially basil. You can run a bunch of them together really soft and essentially have a QB equivalent.

CobKits said:

why not just rewire them to cut current in half? where you have 2 drivers yank them and replace with one driver driving both circuits in parallel

Click to expand...

how would I do that in this situation? right now, I have 5 drivers running 10 modules, 2 modules per driver in parallel I'm assuming...

yup

remove half the drivers. wire half the leds in parallel with the other half
put extra drivers on shelf

instant 10% efficiency upgrade without changing diodes

your light is now half the power so supplement with some newer efficient leds

Photon Flinger said:

You can run a bunch of them together really soft and essentially have a QB equivalent.

Click to expand...

not sure they can get there on efficiency unless they were relatively recent hq diodes (cree, osram, luxeon, etc)