DIY LED CREE under 100$ Build. Max 40,000 Lumen

jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
shimbob said:
*raises hand* to be fair, garbage in garbage out.

What are those meters, I like them. The way you added the ac meter to a power strip is really neat, a DIY killawatt strip.
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Thank You Dear, i say if something is somehow working, don't touch it and let it work until it stops by itself.:)
Unfortunately where i live, no ebay or amazon, So all iam left with is aliexpress. Everything is bought from aliexpress. Its very good and safe, if u dont get your stuff, u get ur money back. There are good sellers and bad sellers as is the case every where. These are Digital voltmeters, i tried to post a link earlier but there was an error regarding i cant post links now, have to wait. Get old here a bit i gues. I'll keep trying and once m able to post links i will post them.Just search AC 220 watt meter , ampmeter, digital amp meter or multimeter, on aliexpress.
 
jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
Randomblame said:
92.2% and 0.96 PF is really pretty good and surprising. I know you can get them as silver and gold versions but never thought they could be so efficient. I have a bunch of the silver 10w/38v/300mA drivers(remnants from 10w floodlight conversion into 6,5w IR triggers) and those are far away from 90%. Probably because they are so small?!? But 92,2% is very good for a 30w driver compared to a Meanwell APC-35-1050 it's even unbelievable(84%). On the other hand, the meters are not calibrated and it is questionable whether they show accurate values. But even if they had only 90% I would be very impressed.
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I believe china is making A grade , b grade...all the way to Z grade...even Z-- . But this driver seller looks like a company because all they have is drivers. let me post a pic from seller s page. This is also very small driver, total length is like one finger, and width is like 2 fingers. looks big in pics though
 

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jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
5 of these drivers for 16 bucks. Not bad. They come like this without casing, what i did was went to a local eectric shop, bought a pvc pipe for 1$ and cut it into 10 pieces. Glued the drivers in.
No .10 is in the clone cabinet, and no. 1,2,3,4 are in flower, my initial plan was to run each cob at 900ma, but then i got confused and thats why i attached 2 cobs to each. I feel that light is already enough. its a 40cm wide ,20cm deep 5 foot height cabinet. i'll add more pics once lights come on in 6 hours. But i can always unscrew some wires and add more drivers, luckily i kept 10 ac220v ports in my cabinet, my plan was to buy 10 more 2540 and add them in another row. But for now plants seems happy.
 

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Humple

Humple

Well-Known Member
jaggwaa said:
5 of these drivers for 16 bucks. Not bad. They come like this without casing, what i did was went to a local eectric shop, bought a pvc pipe for 1$ and cut it into 10 pieces. Glued the drivers in.
No .10 is in the clone cabinet, and no. 1,2,3,4 are in flower, my initial plan was to run each cob at 900ma, but then i got confused and thats why i attached 2 cobs to each. I feel that light is already enough. its a 40cm wide ,20cm deep 5 foot height cabinet. i'll add more pics once lights come on in 6 hours. But i can always unscrew some wires and add more drivers, luckily i kept 10 ac220v ports in my cabinet, my plan was to buy 10 more 2540 and add them in another row. But for now plants seems happy.
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Your cab is 8 inches deep??
 
jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
coreywebster said:
Cool stuff man. Keep the updates flowing!

What will you use for Heatsinks?
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Simple PC heatsinks, i bought 10 of those with fans for 20$ in used. from old computers, you might get them more cheaper from you local computer scrapyard places. And work beautifully, before this build, i had them attached to 50w 220v ac cheap chinese purple grow cobs, (which was a waste of money) and all they produced was a lot of heat but fans kept them so cool that when u hold them, they are not even warm.
 

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Randomblame

Randomblame

Well-Known Member
Yea, I have a few similar drivers from 18w LED tubes(1$, e3ay), uninsulated and they also claim 91% effiency and power factor above 0,9 in their describtion. 80v/240mA max. but unfortunately not dimmable.
I think I'd use them for 2 or 3 BLX Vesta strips (one for each color channel). So I could use them for my living room and use either 5000k, 2700k or both channels together depending on the time of day. But I do not like the solution yet! For my living room I actually want something dimmable, you know, both channels steplessly dimmable so I can mix both spectrums individually. I can not achieve that with these drivers. Although there are dimmable tube drivers(dali) out there, but not for just 1buck like this.

At least they seem to use better chips now in this little tube drivers and have significantly improved the efficiency.
Screenshot_20180622-202731.png Screenshot_20180622-202717.png

I can easily imagine how a 2nd bar like this could be used in flowering when you switch to a 12/12h light regime.
One bar for veg = 18h with up to 128w and two bars for flowering =12h x 256w.
Assuming 140lm/w are ~2,0μMol/j you have ~ 250μMol/s PPF from one bar, or around 500μMol/s/m² PPFD on your 0,5m². (40x 20")
With two it would be already around 1000μMol/s/m².. of course with the usually used 10-20% less it's only around 800-900μMol/s/m², but that's just the amount of light the most growers are looking for.
 
nfhiggs

nfhiggs

Well-Known Member
jaggwaa said:
I believe china is making A grade , b grade...all the way to Z grade...even Z-- . But this driver seller looks like a company because all they have is drivers. let me post a pic from seller s page. This is also very small driver, total length is like one finger, and width is like 2 fingers. looks big in pics though
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I actually have a handful of little drivers like that - but they were 30W instead of the 50W that I ordered so they never got used.
 
nfhiggs

nfhiggs

Well-Known Member
jaggwaa said:
Simple PC heatsinks, i bought 10 of those with fans for 20$ in used. from old computers, you might get them more cheaper from you local computer scrapyard places. And work beautifully, before this build, i had them attached to 50w 220v ac cheap chinese purple grow cobs, (which was a waste of money) and all they produced was a lot of heat but fans kept them so cool that when u hold them, they are not even warm.
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Got me a bunch of those too....
 
jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
1212ham said:
Good point. Some of the power meters out there have poor accuracy! I suggest everyone check any of those meters with a multimeter!

On another forum, a very innovative and prolific builder had been presenting data about efficiency, after it was questioned he discovered his DC power/volt/amp meter was off a few percent! I think it was for electric radio controlled planes etc. I don't see it here, but they have some interesting some stuff.
http://www.buddyrc.com/accessory.html?p=1
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Its all China my friend. Same voltmeter that this website has stated for 16.90$ is listed on aliexpress for 9$.....Almost half the price.....my voltmeters were still 12$:lol:
Also a couple watt off will do what..... its not a heart surgery we are working so that every thing has to be preeeeecise...... and any voltmeter you take, you never know if that one is exact.
 
jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
Anyways, here is an update, i have added four more drivers, removed the parallel and now every cob is running at 900ma or 890ma whatever number looks good to your eyes. This is half the power, max power for cxa2540 is 2100ma/85w, iam running them at 30 watts. The only problem is outside temperature is already above 40 C, and cabinet temp was at 33-34 C with the air conditioner on in my room and room temps between 27-29C . Before there was a 2 degree C difference, now its 5 degree C difference. I have to add a net yet to even my canopy, once that is done i will post some pictures
 
jaggwaa

jaggwaa

Well-Known Member
So 8 cobs running at 30 watts Thats 240 real wall watts. According to cree's data sheet , i should be getting 4000 from each. which equals to 32,000 lumens.
Now i have a question from pro'sss
I can hold the heatsinks in my hands or as long as i want. They are not hot, but also not cold, They just feel very slightly warm, You can imagine that surrounding temps are 33C, so heatsinks cannot be below 33, any idea what temps my cobs are running at? When you touch the heatsink, it takes a couple seconds to feel the little warmth. Because the calculation i did on cree tool, i set the temps to 50C.But iam not sure how much is 50C to touch.
 
wietefras

wietefras

Well-Known Member
I would actually trust a multi meter a lot less to measure power usage. The device needs to measure both voltage and current to adjust for power factor (cos phi) differences. I doubt a multi meter will do that. At least the ones I have don't, since they use different inlets for measuring voltage and current.
 
nfhiggs

nfhiggs

Well-Known Member
jaggwaa said:
Its all China my friend. Same voltmeter that this website has stated for 16.90$ is listed on aliexpress for 9$.....Almost half the price.....my voltmeters were still 12$:lol:
Also a couple watt off will do what..... its not a heart surgery we are working so that every thing has to be preeeeecise...... and any voltmeter you take, you never know if that one is exact.
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Some of the cheap current meters I got from Ebay were off by 50%. That IS a significant error my friend. The advice from 1212ham to verify with a good multimeter is good advice.
 
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