Some of you may have noticed the peculiar lighting in our grow tent. It’s not something you see every day and isn’t like commercial grow lighting. So, if it’s caught your eye, let’s spend a minute demystifying it.
We were extremely early adopters of LED grow lighting technology. Our interest was purely electrical savings and energy efficiency. But, way back then, LED grow lights were insanely expensive, like several thousand dollars each. I just could not justify that on growing broccoli and peppers.
Long story short, I found myself immersed in a tiny world of motivated and surprisingly informed cannabis growers that were pioneering self-designed, high power DIY LED grow lighting. Fortunately, I have an engineering background, which helped me navigate complicated topics like LED drivers, electrical design, thermal dissipation and concepts like safety margins.
Desperate for relief from ridiculously high per kilowatt hour costs, I decided to try my hand at designing and building my own LED grow light. In every way, it exceeded my expectations. So, I built a second one. At that time, I built about $5,000 worth of LED lighting for about 500 bucks.
The technology is called chip on board LED, commonly called COB. It’s basically a chip with a bunch of smaller LED’s, securely attached to a heat sink. The light’s frame is simple aluminum right angle stock. It’s powered by an LED driver, a choice that allowed me to tune power draw and light strength.
That was nearly a decade ago now, well before most of you had heard about growing plants under LED lights. Today, the efficiency of LED is practically a foregone conclusion. The decision saved us, quite literally, thousands of dollars over a decade now. And the lights still work 100%, to this day.
Honestly, I don’t recommend this path these days. Unless you’re a hardcore maker with an unrestrained quest for knowledge. For most of you, we’ve talked about quantum boards. Which are equally as good and are considerably less expensive than anything you could build yourself these days.
So, that’s the story behind these lights. We probably helped put LED’s on the map, particularly in general gardening purposes, as we were one of the first few on earth using LED to grow veggies!
