Klompen
420 Member
Hello. I have been growing my first ever autoflower plants with these cheapo Chinese COB lights that I got on Aliexpress a couple years ago. They make a ton of heat, but they have grown the plants pretty well all things considered.
They certainly do the job, but as I go to build my next chamber I find that I am going to have to build new lights anyway. My new setup will be individual stalls, so that I have 1-2 plants per stall. Each stall is about 28" deep by 16" wide. I want to basically bath the plants in light, similar to my current grow but better. I am really debating using a DIY LED setup of some kind or getting cheap low-wattage LED panels to serve as side-lights. I also am considering the newer generation of these types of COBs, because there are significant changes in the new ones(constant current driver, over-voltage/current protection, heat protection, and no soldering.
They look like this:
That particular one is the very newest and it runs at about 110Lumens/Watt versus the 90 LM/W my current ones do. Is it correct to assume though that these would run even more efficient if I dimmed them?
I could potentially run dimmed chips like this all around my plants, bathing them in ambient light.
I could also potentially surround my plants with something like this:
I could also use some combination of those, but at 20+ dollars each, getting the 16 of them I would need just for the side lights would be kind of brutal on the wallet.
Here is a fairly recent picture from my current grow to help explain what I am doing and what I want to do better...
Those are 5 autoflower plants that have had an increasing amount of light added to them over time. Right now there's something like 81W of side lights total(hard to see them all in the picture), and 450W of COB light overhead. I started with a mix of 2-1 blurple "Full Spectrum" and 4000K White, but the white COBs have burned out left and right. Its clear from looking at them that they weren't made in the same factor as each other so that's probably that.
Anyway, advice, guidance, polite opinions and all that would be appreciated. Thanks!
They certainly do the job, but as I go to build my next chamber I find that I am going to have to build new lights anyway. My new setup will be individual stalls, so that I have 1-2 plants per stall. Each stall is about 28" deep by 16" wide. I want to basically bath the plants in light, similar to my current grow but better. I am really debating using a DIY LED setup of some kind or getting cheap low-wattage LED panels to serve as side-lights. I also am considering the newer generation of these types of COBs, because there are significant changes in the new ones(constant current driver, over-voltage/current protection, heat protection, and no soldering.
They look like this:
That particular one is the very newest and it runs at about 110Lumens/Watt versus the 90 LM/W my current ones do. Is it correct to assume though that these would run even more efficient if I dimmed them?
I could potentially run dimmed chips like this all around my plants, bathing them in ambient light.
I could also potentially surround my plants with something like this:
I could also use some combination of those, but at 20+ dollars each, getting the 16 of them I would need just for the side lights would be kind of brutal on the wallet.
Here is a fairly recent picture from my current grow to help explain what I am doing and what I want to do better...
Those are 5 autoflower plants that have had an increasing amount of light added to them over time. Right now there's something like 81W of side lights total(hard to see them all in the picture), and 450W of COB light overhead. I started with a mix of 2-1 blurple "Full Spectrum" and 4000K White, but the white COBs have burned out left and right. Its clear from looking at them that they weren't made in the same factor as each other so that's probably that.
Anyway, advice, guidance, polite opinions and all that would be appreciated. Thanks!
