LEDgardener

Curious to know more about the pros and cons of COBs vs. LED Strips.

Please offer any feedback, knowledge and personal experience with each.

Strips are a little cheaper. You can get better spread out of strips than cobs, you can put strips closer to the plants than cobs, giving you better penetration. You don't have the hotspots with strips like you do with cobs if you set them up right.

Strips also seem to have less heat issues too. And leds seem to get less efficient as they get bigger.

Perhaps some benefits to cobs are that they are more established, since they have history, and perhaps strips lead to unwieldy structures. Surely its easier to deal with optics on a cob, then on strips.

So then I will assume COBs have a greater penetration from a distance. Especially higher powered ones (i.e. Vero C's).

And the LED strips have the ability to form a well-distributed "sheet" of light over the canopy (using less money) and can be placed closer, thereby reducing light burn and offering similar penetration levels?

Also thinner builds allow for more vertical space saved.



I'm looking for reasons to use COBs at this point beyond that they are more proven since they have a history. More for knowledge's sake than anything else. I'm curious.


The strips are cheaper, so they won the reality battle so far.

If you already have COBs, its a good reason to use them, and also using strips and cobs in the same fixture might be hard, since the intensity is so different.

The penetration in a cob should surely be better, but I think there are limits to penetration, if you really try to pack your space in. I just did a few runs trying to get a 730w plasma to penetrate. I had it perhaps 50cm above canopy. If I put a plant to the side, about 1.5m away, it flowered fine, but it would not penetrate too deeply in the areas where there were colas bumper to bumper, with all their fan leaves. Maybe 40-50cm max. Now with 9x 184 diodes replacing a single bulb, light coverage is way better, even though I downgraded to 225w, but I will certainly go for penetration with side lighting. grow trees that have solid buds from bottom up.

Perhpas the way to think about cobs it that it took them, to convince the world that leds really work, after disappointment in cheap blurple.
Finally getting the light close has benefits at the level that light efficiency can never achieve. This is where leds beat HID, they can halve the distance quite many times before problems. And this is why the strips beat COBs (I think)... They get closer, while still covering the plant.

Randomblame from riu seems to be getting great results from strips. It seems that strips give better penetration, because you have light coming from so many different angles. There is very little shadowing.

He claims to have no "larf" on the bottom. Nice quality buds all around.

I talked with a grow shop owner today, he seemed pretty sure that equatorial origin plants would prefer intense light from directly above, while plants from other parts of the world respond better to light coming in from the side. Perhaps something like this might play into the question of cobs vs strips? I do remember reading that the HPS vert crowd said genetics need to be matched to grow style.

unkle_psycho wrote: ↑

Tue May 22, 2018 9:45 am

I talked with a grow shop owner today, he seemed pretty sure that equatorial origin plants would prefer intense light from directly above, while plants from other parts of the world respond better to light coming in from the side. Perhaps something like this might play into the question of cobs vs strips? I do remember reading that the HPS vert crowd said genetics need to be matched to grow style.

I forgot to factor that in. On the gml show a few weeks back they were talking about how most strains were tuned to hps or mh. They were saying if we had started with leds we might have completely different strains today. Let's start taking strains that respond well to leds and making them better. Lol

sdfoster22 wrote: ↑

Tue May 22, 2018 11:13 am

unkle_psycho wrote: ↑

Tue May 22, 2018 9:45 am

I talked with a grow shop owner today, he seemed pretty sure that equatorial origin plants would prefer intense light from directly above, while plants from other parts of the world respond better to light coming in from the side. Perhaps something like this might play into the question of cobs vs strips? I do remember reading that the HPS vert crowd said genetics need to be matched to grow style.

I forgot to factor that in. On the gml show a few weeks back they were talking about how most strains were tuned to hps or mh. They were saying if we had started with leds we might have completely different strains today. Let's start taking strains that respond well to leds and making them better. Lol

Yes, in my opinion, 40y ++ of selecting, breading, crossing strains under HIDs and fluoro only, has influenced today's varieties-strains... A LOT...
Even the nutrition schedule need to be improved/diversified for led only growing... even COB vs strip have different needs... (cal mag deff under led... etc...)
this could also be a good/new marketplace for new strains that are selected for led light and new fertilizer line just for led... Hydro/led and Bio/led fertilizer line nice niche... right?