Cutter Cree Strip Tests

Hi everyone, my first thread on here and I want to say thank you to the people who have been patient as a few have been waiting. I am going to upload a few pictures of the test equipment I am using to do these tests and follow up a big later as I want to go and have a beer on my Sunday afternoon.

The equipment I use to conduct tests if very different from what people are used to hearing about. Most people discuss using a sphere to check efficiency, a sphere is pretty old now and they were designed to test light bulbs not LED's, you may have also heard of a goniometer test, a goniometer test is done to find out how a light spreads so you can work out the beam angles, the main purpose of conducting a goniometer test is to get what is called an IES file, an IES can be opened in specific programs to view the lights as a 3 dimensional image.
Where having an IES file is useful to the people on here is because you can actually create simulation of your own grow room on your computer using a free and easy to use program called Dialux. If you have not watched this video yet is a fast explanation of how the test equipment I have works, if you watch it until the end you can see an IES file being used in a grow room simulation.
I own 2 products from Viso, one is the portable LightSpion and the other is the top of the range LabSpion

One of the issues with tests done in a sphere is the results can often be very different from an actual test in real life, the main reason for this is the way a sphere works, this is why you will see a company claim that they have 220 lumens per watt efficiency but when a light is made out of the leds that have 220 lumens per watt they retest the light and the efficiency is nowhere close to what the initial claim was. Leds are also very sensitive to heat and my tests do take a while to do, I have to make sure that the light is stable in temperature before doing a test so I can get accurate results.

When you see me post tests they will be tests done at operating temperature the same way as they will actually be once they are in your grow room and not in a Lab. I also won't fuck with the results like they do all the time in China to make things look better. I don't actually care what brand is better than another but I refuse to test Chinese copy boards cause I just don't like the copy fuckers.

I forgot to take my thermometer to the factory today to measure the temperature of the Cutter strips but I will do operating temperatures when I get a moment, my machine tells me how stable a light is before I allow it to do a test so I made sure they were as accurate as possible.

I also need to purchase a power supply that can handle over 40VDC to make my life easier and I will be getting one soon. The way I did the tests today was using a meanwell LCM driver and I measured the output current and voltage with my fluke multimeter to see what the draw was.

Very intriguing. Def interested in hearing more. Enjoy some beer.

radiant Rudy said:

Very intriguing. Def interested in hearing more. Enjoy some beer.

Click to expand...

I am enjoying some beer, cheers
Results will be loaded in a bit.
I have to note that I am making ppf measurements between 360-840nm

The reason for this is that's the range I can test at right now, standards for ppf are also changing to a broader range.

I was at Cutter last week, they are really under the pump at the moment with orders, I have attached the test results of 3 of the Cree strips. Keep in mind these are real test results not cold sphere tests.
I will try to get some other strips from them when possible.

If anyone wants an IES file to be able to do Computer simulations with these PM me
Thanks

I forgot to mention, 500mA is about perfect for these strips, heat is no issue and performance is good also. I will crank the shit out of them to see what they do when I have time at the factory just for reference.

Great to see some measurements of these.

Good to see you got a thread going.

Id run them crees at 1amp. No point under driving them as other strips will perform better. Low cost high PPF is what id go for with these.

diyled said:

Good to see you got a thread going.

Id run them crees at 1amp. No point under driving them as other strips will perform better. Low cost high PPF is what id go for with these.

Click to expand...

I will crank them to 1amp and test one to see how different the efficiency is. I did test them at 700mA today also.

nice to see some testing after all the talk.
so how do cutters cree strips perform in your test equipment compared to how cutter states they perform on their website? not really up to speed on the cree chips performance.

now it sure would be nice if we could see some other manufactures products ran through your tests so we can see how they all stack up.

grotbags said:

nice to see some testing after all the talk.
so how do cutters cree strips perform in your test equipment compared to how cutter states they perform on their website? not really up to speed on the cree chips performance.

now it sure would be nice if we could see some other manufactures products ran through your tests so we can see how they all stack up.

Click to expand...

You would have to check up on the Cree data sheets to see the differences between things.
I'm hoping more will send me products to test, I can understand why they hesitate as the tests are done differently and it's possible that my tests may make things look bad for them, COB kits sent me a message earlier so hopefully I will test some new generation COBs.

Does your equipment give a lux/ppf per watt conversion factor? As in how many lum/w would 1ppf/w be?

Rocket Soul said:

Does your equipment give a lux/ppf per watt conversion factor? As in how many lum/w would 1ppf/w be?

Click to expand...

I need to post lumens as well, I am going to make a different report that has both lumens and ppf so it's easy to work out. It should work out good for those that don't have a par meter.

good thread

how many watts is 500ma?