i don’t have watts and amps mixed up exactl
Not watt and ampere - VOLT and watt
, forget about watt for awhile and focus on volt and ampere
Volt and Ampere is what we put in our unit(s), and watt is what we pay to put the V and A in.
The driver is 185H-C700, so constant current with max 700mA output, a maximum output voltage of 286V, and rated at 200.2watts - so I understand the basics well enough to know that’s not going to fry my boards (at least I think I do!
).
Output voltage: 143...286V DC - Your units' combined voltage has to be in this range for it to work.
Output current: 350...700mA
Efficiency: 94%
You can adjust the ampere, and the volt is automatically matched with the current, so you can't just assume that your boards get 48V each, it might be 46V or lower at 0,7 ampere
Your boards 5*48V = 240v
And 1,2 ampere, so you can't come close to overpowering your 5 boards.
To estimate percentage of max rating: 700 mA / 1200 mA = 0,58333333 ->
58,3% of max, but in reality it's lower because the voltage is probably a bit lower.
To estimate AC draw: 0,7A * 240V = 168w DC x 1,06 =
178,08w AC, and probably a bit lower in reality, my guess is 167w
What I was wondering about above was 2 things really (kind of related). One was how do I work out how hard I should drive them for my space. So your help is appreciated - I’m trying to get my head around it.
General advice is 50-75%, but I'd recommend having a driver that can power the units at at least 75% of max, the price difference when going up a size in driver is marginal.
But if the driver can give you more than 100% of max you have to hook up a multimeter when adjusting the output.
How hard you should drive them depends on the number of diodes, what stage in the cycle the plants are in and what you want to achieve.
Rule of thumb is 800 diodes per m2 (10,8 sq. ft.) 464 diodes in your case (running at 75% of max in flower)
Another rule of thumb is 30w per sq. ft., but that's too vague a rule in my opinion.
(The other thing - was wondering about what Chris was talking about with driving them... because I don’t really understand things well enough to get why going for the efficiency is not a good idea in terms of light, and i wanted to understand it better. I may never though at this rate
)
The rule of thumb of more units running softer applies to COBs, not to middle power diodes.
You want to run middle power diodes at 50-75% of max to get a good mix of output and efficiency, running them too soft gives you very little penetration power and you have to do ScroG to get some proper bud.
Personally I think 50% is too weak for flowering(with 800 diodes/m2), so I usually go for 70-80%
50% of a HLG driver's max is usually where it drops below 90% efficiency
Few questions about that... are you talking about the V and A of teh driver or the boards there? How do I know how efficient the driver is? And is that meant to be a comma? (This is about where my brain begins to fry
)
I'm talking about the actual V and A going into the unit(s), not the min/nominal/max ratings of either.
It's in the specs for the driver, keep in mind that dimming lowers the efficiency which there should be a graph for in the data sheet.
It's a decimal seperator, visualize a point if you like
Hope that clarifies it a bit, I know it's hard to learn from text, being a learning by doing person myself
