Wow, this stuff makes my head hurt (worse) and my eyes glaze over. We could really use a Homer Simpson level DIY COB primer thread (or... section, lol).
I was planning to use Vero18s, but I discovered the Citizen1212s which are much more efficient at the same cost.
Are you talking about the (Citizen) 48 or 52?
I have gotten the impression through semi-random web searching that the efficiency of various COBs varies depending on the amount of power that they are driven at... IOW, that one brand/model might be more efficient than another at a certain power level, but when the power is increased, that the efficiency ranking could change. Is that correct, or not? If so... HtH do people ever figure out exactly what they should be building/running, lofl? I'm lost after the "Okay, my grow room area is..." step :rolleyes3 . At least with HPS, assuming a decent reflector, one can look at their area - and the
shape of that area - and then generally determine what wattage and how many HPS lights it'd require to give good coverage and intensity for a room full of sativas (or indicas, I guess). Speaking in generalities, they can even get a rough estimate of
n watts per square foot. Sure, some HPS bulbs (in a particular wattage) are better than others, but there does not seem to be a
great deal of difference. With LEDs, though... Several manufacturers, each seems to have several models of COB - and I don't even know how to "read" the codes for one brand (FFS!), like Cree has CXA2520 all the way up to (if not more, by now) CXB3690 or maybe it's CXC or CXD I can't even remember that much... - which have different levels of efficiency, which again seems to vary by the amount of power they're being fed, and bins and drivers and stuff which is like... IDK. I figured I'd do a little searching and try to give myself a
basic understanding and it was like I set out to figure out which brand of tv dinner was more nutritious and only end up finding articles on the genetics of what the freakin' mother of the cow that eventually went on to form (some small part of) the salisbury steak
ate along with a bunch of electron microscope images of the plastic tray. I should have just bent over and ran full tilt into the nearest brick wall, lol - my head wouldn't have hurt any worse, I would have gained just as much of a basic understanding of all this sh!t, and I could have saved a few hours. MAN, I wish I was still twelve years old and hadn't gotten hit in the head with everything from baseballs, the ground, and a few 3,000+ pound vehicles that wanted to see if they could fit through my windshield...
I started out thinking that Cree was what you bought if you wanted the best. I don't even know if that's right. I saw mention of Bridgelux, Citizen, Osram, Philips, Vero, Nichia, Toyota(???), and even Sharp who last I heard couldn't even make a halfway decent microwave. IDK. Sorry for the rant, but... I guess you guys haven't been knocked out half a dozen times and knocked silly LOTS more and are still young enough that your cognitive function is still kickin', lol. But there's a lot of decrepit old farts here whose hands
might still be steady enough to use a soldering iron who could benefit from a thread like "For a 3' x 8' Room, buy THESE Parts from THESE People for THIS Much Money for Great Intensity @ THIS Many Watts (THIS Year)." Then, people could advance from the pre-school thread to a kindergarten one that discussed options like what if your room is smaller/larger, or hey I cannot support that many watts in my house trailer so if I shrink my space can I get by with
n watts and, if so, which changes do I need to make to the basic design - with part # recommendations, please? Stuff like that.
I have an Amare Technologies SE350+UVB here, that I've got to do a grow with. I'm
assuming that I'll have to give it back because it's, what, something like a $900 piece of kit, lol. But I figured after the grow, I'll have learned something about growing under LEDs (as I have never done so before and my current knowledge level is... well, you just read my rant, lol, so that much is obvious
) and ought to be able to do better and learn more on a second grow (and so on) . PLUS, with a little bit of experience, I might wonder if changing to a different style / training method might give a higher g/w . Stuff like that - IOW, I can see the one grow turning into
many that could still be learning experiences for me and others... and potentially help the company's sales by showing that even a dumb@ss (in regards to this LED stuff, at least) like me who has grown before with different types of lighting but never LEDs really could make the transition to LED. Which means... well... when I complete that first grow, instead of emailing to ask, "Do you want me to ship this LED panel back now?" I'll probably just, err, wait on
them to email
me and in the meantime keep on using it and learning with it, lol. Now, of course, my possession of the panel after that becomes
completely hypothetical - and I know this. But... IF I still have the thing, say, six or ten grows from now, I'll probably have reached the point of diminishing returns, that any further knowledge I get from it would be relatively small. So I was thinking about that hypothetical future point and wondering, "Okay, this panel has some kind of COBs in it. I think they might be (CXA???)2520s. Maybe 2530s, but I read that the early versions of this model had 2520s and this particular one was so early it might have been a prototype (or even THE prototype, lol). So... Could I upgrade the COBs in this panel at some point? What, exactly, would that involve? JUST changing the COBs, or would I need to change bins/drivers/power supplies/whatever else is in the thing I sure am not going to open it to find out because it's not broken and I don't want to change that, lol. I'm not even sure about this much, but I
think that all COBs are not the same size, so I'd at the least need to figure out which one(s) is/are the same physical size.
Obviously, like I mentioned, that thought about upgrading is all hypothetical. But it sure would be nice if I could find a stickied thread that had the basic information - and in a dumbed-down form - that I'd need to digest in order to even think about it. Err... I'm ranting again, aren't I? Sorry.
I really think the future is cobs that are mostly white but have supplemented spectrum. Just to change the shape of the white spectrum to add more red and blue, UV, IR.
That's the way that this SE350+UVB is: Six COBs and each one has a ring of ten mono-color LEDs around it. The COBs give "white" (I think it might be ever so slightly off-white, but my color perception is all screwed up and isn't even the same from one eye to the other, so I'm not sure and couldn't begin to say whether it leans a little towards yellow, green, blue, red, or... But I'm pretty sure that the individual LEDs are a mix of red, blue, white, and "IR." (And why everyone calls them IR is beyond me since last I heard the human eye cannot even perceive infrared but we can see the illumination from these, albeit dimly.) I think it's a really cool product, to be honest. Seems to have been well built, from some pictures I've seen it is capable of producing (and producing a
lot for just ~350 watts), comes with removable 90° lenses for the COBs that really look like decent optics instead of cheap junk (and you get a 120°, IIRC, pattern without the lenses - which gives you some ability to tailor the light to the space/setup in terms of penetration vs. footprint size - and since there's one for each COB I suppose you could remove the two middle lenses and keep the four at the corners installed, or vice versa for a "hybrid affect"), and it was designed with the purpose of growing
cannabis in mind. I couldn't say how it would rank in terms of other brands (and this model is a year or two old and a generation behind the company's current version in terms of wattage, COBs, etc.) but I'd think it'd fall
somewhere nearer the top than the bottom at least. I'm pretty impressed already with just the impressions I have gotten with it before actually growing with it, feel privileged to have been given the chance to use it, and am a bit embarrassed that I was not able to get an a/c so I could have gone ahead and used it from the time that I received it instead of having to wait until the weather cooperated.
Now that I recall, the concept of adding mono-color LEDs to customize the spectral output (and, of course, the overall level of illumination) is not new. Six years or so ago there was someone who was either selling or getting ready to sell induction fluorescent grow lights, and he was talking about adding a few (like four or five on each end of the fixture, something like that) for that purpose. IDK what ever became of that, because he seemed to only have been here a few months and then quietly disappeared.
This post is quite a train wreck. Apologies....
Their latest series nearly matches the CXB3590 for much less cost.
but I'm a hobby grower. If I was a pro, I'm not sure I could justify COBs over hps.
