Ive been happy with stuff from kingbrite and meijiu. For us components: digikey or arrow, if you have a partnr then just search it using octopart and all it brings back all available dealers. Rapidled is another popular dealer but i havent tried them.myself. For EU: TME or led-tech.de
Thanks Rocket Soul,
I'm responding to you, but don't feel like you're obligated to responded. I'm doing some thinking out loud here and of course input from anyone is greatlyappreciated.
I was thinking about having the red, uv, and ir on seperate bars and possibly drivers, but I don't think it's worth the hassle. It's like another $10 a board to have them on there and then I'm just done with it. I do lose a an equal amount of white diodes doing it like that, but then it's less headache. However, I recall it's not recommended to have these on all the time and going this route means I can't switch them without doing some surgery on the boards. Maybe I should reconsider this.
I compared the cost per watt of the the HLG-*H-48B drivers from Mouser and this is what I found:
Model | Wattage | Cost (USD) | Cost Per Watt |
HLG-600H-48B | 600 | $ 187.00 | $ 0.31 |
HLG-480H-48B | 480 | $ 136.00 | $ 0.28 |
HLG-320H-48B | 320 | $ 99.00 | $ 0.31 |
HLG-240H-48B | 240 | $ 64.00 | $ 0.27 |
HLG-185H-48B | 185 | $ 53.00 | $ 0.29 |
HLG-150H-48B | 150 | $ 49.00 | $ 0.33 |
HLG-120H-48B | 120 | $ 48.00 | $ 0.40 |
HLG-100H-48B | 100 | $ 47.00 | $ 0.47 |
HLG-80H-48B | 80 | $ 39.00 | $ 0.49 |
HLG-60H-48B | 60 | $ 33.00 | $ 0.55 |
HLG-40H-48B | 40 | $ 32.00 | $ 0.80 |
The very small ones aren't worth it, but once you get to the 150 and up there aren't any huge savings and you get what you pay for. Thanks to your octopart suggestion I can find the cheapest source, but I'll probably only save a few bucks because these are priced pretty competitively.
The bulk of the cost is going to be the light strips/bars for sure . I think for best coverage six of the L560 boards (560mm or roughly 2'), at least for the flowering section would be best and probably for the veg section too. I could scrimp a bit because the veg probably would be okay with less light, but I'd need them farther from the plants for good coverage and I've only got 3' to work with. Maybe I should just do six here too, maybe with less power, but most likely the same driver dimmed in the event I need to steal it because a flower one crapped out.
Here's the cost:
I'll need to grab some dimmer knobs (Kingbrite has them, I guess if it doesn't affecting the shipping price I should just grab them), and some wiring and misc hardware, but I can get those through amazon and/or local.
The one thing I like that KB has are those long, green aluminum rails that the strips can be attached to. I don't see them offered individually and I'm sure they'd be expensive to ship. I could probably just get some metal bars locally if needed.
What are your opinions on the size of the drivers? Should I get a smaller one for veg or get the same size and dim it? I know that might lower the driver efficiency, but would it reduce the heat output and maybe prolong the driver and led life?
What do you think about getting multiple drivers for each section instead of one big one? My thought was if I have one driver for six lights and it goes out for repair there's no lights on that tier. If I had four of the same drivers, two for each tier running three strips, If one went out I could rearrange them so the flowering lights are in tact and the veg lights could run on one at half power. Or I could buy an extra just in case so if any need to be sent in for warranty I have an immediate replacement. I was thinking maybe four of the 185s or 240s (they'd have to be turned down a bit.
And maybe I'm going into this with naivete, but from my understanding the boards are wired for 48V, so I'd get a driver ending in "-48B" so the voltage is 48V. If I were to use a 240W driver undimmed and kept adding strips in parallel would it work like this?
Output of Undimmed Driver (Watts) | # of Strips/Boards Wired in Parallel | Wattage Used | Power to Each Strip/Board (W) |
240W | 1 | 70W | 70W |
240W | 2 | 140W | 70W |
240W | 3 | 210W | 70W |
240W | 4 | 240W | 60W |
240W | 5 | 240W | 48W |
240W | 6 | 240W | 40W |
Just join all the positive leads and all the negative leads.