Im looking to build a light for my 4x4 tent and I wanted to go with led strips, cobs, or qbs. Which one has the most pros which one should I avoid? Also this will be a flowering tent.
I was initially going to build the HLG 550 V2 but I got interested in led strips. Which led strips are the best right now? Any help is appreciated.
Long story short, they all work.
COBs require big heatsinks / active cooling solutions, the other 2 options not. Some people run the strips without any heatsink at all but I would advise against doing that for reliability and efficiency reasons.
I have some of the Samsung Q series strips and the quality of them is top notch. Their H and F series strips seem to be the most popular for our purpose. There are also quality options from Bridgelux as well as others.
The strips as well as the COBs give you the chance to play around with the light spectrum a bit more than the QBs. Other than that, I'd say that the QBs are probably the easiest DIY option if they're available where you live. Watch out for the Chinese knock offs.. some of them might work just as good as the original QBs but plenty of them won't.
I personally run Bridgelux COBs but mostly because I like to tinker with different builds, water cooling and different grow spaces.