LED Grow Light, LedEngin 10W, Seoul 2.5W

[purduephotog]

As you saw in an earlier post I was / am trying to find some royal blue CREEs and not having much luck. I did come up with some on Mouser that are being discontinued- but before I plop down the 200$ I'd like just a bit of sanity check here.

Building around the 40W Xitanium device (40$), I'd like to put 4x of the LedEngin 10W Deep Red ( http://www.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Ntt=*897LZ440R210 , 32$). Spec is 11.6V, .7A

If I read that right then I'd be wiring the array as 2x2 - 2 in series to get to 24V and then another string in parallel- but that only is 1.4A instead of the 1.7 the unit states.

Will I be over driving the LedEngin Deep reds?

Next I'd pick up 10 or so of these 2.5W Royal Blue (soon to be discontinued: http://www.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Ntt=*889D32282 ). The specs didn't match up- I eventually found them and they're rated at 3.5/4.0V and 0.8A. That means 6x in series (24V) and 2 strings (12 total). 80 Watts total.

How's my math looking?

Any cheaper drivers? I'd hate to spend so much on this just for a test to find out I could have gone cheaper for this testing.

Thanks in advance-

Jason (lovin his garlic growlight...)

 

[SafetyBob]

My quick addition basically comes to what you have too.

Now for some advice. You cannot purchase anything of much better quality, construction, and reliability than those Xitanium transformers. The only thing you could do is to refigure your setup with the lower power ones, but it probably wouldn't save you much, if any, money. Been there, done that.

Go ahead, put the money down, if this doesn't work exactly as you like you are not totally screwed, you will have those lovely transformers to use with something else.

As far as the 10Watt blue strings, I doubt they are dogs, but since they are being discontinued, they don't move well, I will suggest most people are using the cheaper single LED's and making room for a bunch of them to make up the difference. Thinking about it, most manufacturers of products using multiple blue LEDs are going to engineer the cheap into it and not reduce profit margin for such a specialized product. So nice units like yours are not going to be used. Only very, very few products right now even use what we have used for the past couple of years modding M@gs, the Seoul P4 or one of the equal Cree products.....you are finding yourself on the bleeding edge here. Get them while the getting is good. It might be awhile before more are made.

Bob E.

 

[purduephotog]

Thanks Bob-

I did some more calculations to see cost/watt emitted and contacted some manufacturers to get their irradiance numbers- we'll see if I can, otherwise I'm just guessing on the efficacy values for the blues and reds.

Hate to splurge on something that may not work, ya know?

The only 40W regulator I've found is the one on Ebay, and I hate to have to design such a large setup right off the bat. Maybe I'll pick up some cheap 5W units from DX- I wonder if they have a 10W... hrmm...

 

[kuprith]

it would be much better if you could design a switching psu.

 

[purduephotog]

it would be much better if you could design a switching psu.

Haha-

Someone bought up all the stock of the 2.5W units- I got the last 14. Oh well, 14x2.5 = 35 watts- looks like I'll be running slightly hot on these guys.

Unfortunately 14 means at 4.0V = 6x2 and 2 extra, giving each strand almost 850 ma power- 125% over current.

Now to find a pulse generator.