There are so many advantages to building your own LED grow light, from savings to customization to output. Making your own light is a lot of fun and if you put money towards creating your own light rather than buying a premade unit off of Amazon or eBay, you’ll end up with a final product that’s FAR more powerful and efficient.
Month: November 2016 (Page 1 of 2)
If you’re going to the trouble of building your own grow light system, you might as well put all those lazy photons you’re producing to work. It’s amazing how much light and growing potential is wasted if you’re simply running your lights in open air. I took a rather unscientific measurement of how much light was hitting my plant shelf before creating the DIY grow tent and after, and the difference was huge.
Edit 06-18-2017: Here’s another tent I built using the same black and white poly, this time paired with some spare wood I had lying around.
Advantages of Using a Grow Tent
There are a few reasons why using a grow tent is a good idea:
- You can control the temperature of your growing area better
- You can control the humidity of your growing area better
- A tent with reflective walls will redirect a TON of light back towards your plants that would otherwise have been lost. With no reflective film and just a regular old wire shelf, I was getting about 6700 Lux (Lumens per square meter).
There are 2 ways to go about wiring LEDs: series and parallel. In most cases, if you have a constant current driver, you’re going to want to wire them in series. If you’re using a constant voltage driver, chances are, you’ll be wiring in parallel. You may even need to combine both methods in order to hit a certain voltage or current to match to a particular driver (see my post on matching COBs to drivers for more info on this). This information applies to LEDs of all types, whether they’re COBs, boards, strips, or whatever.
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