LEDgardener

I have been waiting on a build for a while, and still waiting for parts. Decided I don't need to waste time, better use it for brainstorming.

So as a first test I'm making a 75w light to flower a single plant. The light is cardboard; 12x 1 foot bridgelux vestas are held by clothespins. I guess I will put some aluminum baking sheet to act as a heatsink, although they will only be receiving 6.25w per foot anyway.
I was thinking of putting 6 strips on top, and having another 6 as side lighting.

I'm enjoying this way more then I should. I've been grinning through the whole build.

So the first top light is done, and with all the foil used for heatsinking I'm starting to imagine this can be run as hard as it could if properly set up.

One strange thing I noticed is that when I sparked it up, my killawatt style extension chord said I was using 50w, which has already climbed to 58w. My driver is the Thomas Research Products 75w driver. Does anyone have an idea where around 20% of the power could disappear?

I guess I will check amperes and volts before I try hooking up another driver... I have a few of these same drivers left over.

I would check the dc side with a multimeter. Do you have a pot hooked up? TRP did recommend a 40kohm linear taper potentiometer when I emailed them.

I switched to another driver, and its hovering around 69-70w. Tomorrow I'll check all 10 of my drivers with a multimeter, and see how much variation there is.

I didn't hook up the side lights, so the 1ft strips are receiving around 12w each, to a single channel. Slight air movement from a fan, and the strips are very cool to the touch. I'm pretty certain the foil is cooling way better then the alu railing I have on my other light. I made slits in the cardboard frame, and pulled the foil through to the back of the light. Looks horrible, but works great.

So today I added the first two pieces of side lighting. I understood that the strips just share the power between each other, but as I added the first side light, the power jumped from 70w to 75w. Then I added a two foot strip (same voltage so I figured its ok), and the power use jumped to 85w.

Also I would have expected the 2foot strip to look dimmer then the 1 foot strips, but they look just as bright.