They are actually air cooled.
I guess that was a poor choice of words on my part. What I meant was that they are not air-cooled in the
traditional sense, IOW, there is no intake duct on one side and exhaust duct on the opposite side so that the grower can remove the heat that the thing produces without it mixing with the atmosphere of his/her grow room. Sort of like, well, any air-cooled HID reflector. AfaIK only one or two of
Amare Technologies' Pro models (such as one version of their 900-watt panel, IIRC?) and
possibly one other LED brand have this option. All the remaining LED lights / panels - if they have any active cooling instead of relying on passive cooling - merely use built-in fans to cool the lights by blowing the grow room's air across them. Which is to say, the cooling apparatus is just a heat exchanger - removing heat from the LEDs and adding it to the grow room's air.
Whether one notices or not, such lights - like all lights - DO add heat to the grow room. 400 watts' worth of lighting adds, what... between 1,200 and 1,300 BTUs per hour? That's the down side of setups like these that use multiple (separate) COBs - or multiple CFL bulbs, for that matter - one cannot easily segregate the heat given off by the lights from the grow room in general. That complicates sealing the room for CO₂ supplementation, it means that one's exhaust fan needs to be sized at least a little bit larger (capacity), one's carbon filter lasts at least a little bit less (both because there is more air moving through it AND because that air is somewhat hotter than it otherwise would have been, which decreases the efficiency and lifetime of the thing), et cetera.
Obviously, many people run setups like that - multiple CFL bulbs (I have only seen a couple examples of "sealed" air-cooled CFL reflectors, probably either because it forces the grower to place all of the CFL bulbs together or out of some misguided idea that CFL bulbs are "cool"), growers using MH and/or HPS bulbs in "open" reflectors, growers using HIDs in a "bare-bulb" setup... and probably 99+% of growers who use LEDs. <SHRUGS> But it's less efficient on several levels. OtOH, I have read about the concept of using water-cooled CPU type products to cool COBs in a DiY setup, and that looked intriguing. Sure, it goes against the "KiSS" principle, lol - but it seems relatively straightforward, and it has been around for years in the computer overclocking world. The grower could use a liquid to remove the (light's) heat from the grow room and send it to some kind of water-to-air heat exchanger. Or he/she could use a reasonably large reservoir sitting on his/her concrete basement floor (even mine stays relatively cool in the Summer - and my house is like an oven with a mailbox attached :rolleyes3 ); a thin-floored reservoir that was relatively large in area but shallow might be the most efficient, here. If the grower is large enough to have a pond worthy of the name... I doubt the average personal-sized grow would produce enough heat to raise the temperature of a pond enough to begin killing the fish wholesale (although I suppose I
could be wrong). Such heat undoubtedly wouldn't even be noticed in an in-ground swimming pool. And I briefly wondered if a reasonably large household - married couple with two or three children - would flush a toilet often enough that the small amount of water in the storage tank would be "refreshed" enough times per day to serve the purpose of a water-cooled reservoir... before I realized that not everyone's toilet was manufactured in (I found a date on mine last year, lol) April, 1970 - and that newer models use far less water than the older ones do. A setup that is well thought out (and well-built) should NOT suffer any breaches, high-quality pumps can literally last
years (and with a little effort, one could build in a second pump for redundancy), and many (most, lol?) COBs have provisions for temperature sensors, so one could add in the ability to either shut off the power to the LEDs or else drastically dim them (20%? IDK...) in order to safeguard against overheating damage in the (very) unlikely event that an issue occurred. Best of all, water-cooling setups would allow multiple COBs to be used
but not require them to be placed side-by-side in a single enclosure.
Yes, a water-cooling setup would cost more
in the short term. But the title of this thread
IS "Best LED if money was no issue"
.
I'm running mine right now. I'm currently running the 3k's at only 25W each and the heatsinks on the back don't even get above room temp.
Both logic and physics states that they would
have to. They are producing heat - and the heatsinks are, in turn, being heated by them and radiating that heat into the grow room. It's just that old "multiple sources of less heat (
each) instead of a single source that is hotter (but producing the same amount of gross heat output)" thing fooling you. IOW, shove them all into a small well-insulated box, add an unwrapped frozen ice cream sandwich, seal the lid shut, fire the lights up, and come back in twelve hours to see how they - and the ice cream drink I mean sandwich are doing, lol.
I'm running my 5k's at 65W each and the heatsinks are just above room temp. I can run them up to 80+ watts each but I have more than 1 cob per square foot so it's unneeded for me to run them hard at all.
They're
all going to be above room temperature (to one
degree (lol) or other, depending on the wattage that they're eating). A larger heatsink just spreads that heat out, making any particular area less hot (again, simple physics) - but it's all the same if the heatsinks/fans are
inside the grow room - all the heat is, too.
I can tell you that since I just took out all of my Platinum's and other 3w LED's and am now running these cobs, my air conditioner is off far more than it's on. These hands down produce far less heat than my 3w led's do.
That would be attributable to one or more of: less gross wattage, higher efficiency of the replacement products, lower ambient temperature, et cetera. My
guess is that efficiency plays a part. Electrically-powered lights... eat electricity and crap out two things, lol: light and heat. Law of Conservation of... IDK, I'm burnt
. But as an extreme example, if a light is 1% efficient, for every 100 watts' worth of electricity it consumes, it is only producing one watt's worth of light (so to speak - I know light isn't measured that way) but with a 99% efficient light, for every 100 watts that it consumes, it produces 99 watts' worth of heat. Now that doesn't mean that the 99% efficient light produces 99 times less heat because light, itself, seems to produce heat when it interacts with solid objects (or... something). But, anyway, even a 99.999999999999(etc. to infinity)% efficient electric light will produce
some heat.
I'm just rambling. It's either that or climb up on the roof and get the neighbor's cat down, and my extension ladder got ran into by a truck and is "a little" bit bent (won't collapse any more, won't "sit" straight, probably isn't nearly as safe as it looks (which is not very
)... So I figured I'd wait until it got dark and everyone else in the neighborhood went in for the night so that if I ended up falling of, I wouldn't die...
...of embarrassment
.
Guess I better go get the poor thing off now, though. Looks like it might rain (probably just enough to raise the humidity, but...) in a few hours, and that thing has been up there all day so it looks like it doesn't believe that cats always land on their feet....
