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Finally convinced a friend to upgrade from HID, helped him build a LED qb bar light. He was thinking of retiring the HID for many reasons. replacing shit the whole time. electricity consumption. heat.... told him if he puts out the cash I'll source and order the shit for him, recieve everything and when time comes to slap it all together I'll just need a hand, he just needed that last nudge and so it begins! I think I was more excited about the build than he was! He's got a 1.2m x 1.2m x 2m tent, so we basically copied the 4'x4' example design on LED gardener, used the Q series samsung LM301H strips in 3000k. First things first, size of the tent will determine the size of the frame that we build for the LEDs. Work out how much Aluminium strip we gona need. Source local aluminium extrusions. This was the only profile available in bulk on the day, we didn't wana wait, so we planned around this. You can work with any profile and have any extrusion company roll out the profile you want at the lenght you want. Easiest part of the build. Having the aluminium, knowing how you can lay strips on the extrusion profile you can use this information to spread out the LED strips as much as possible so there are no fluxuation areas. no need to raise the hight of the light to get better coverage which would mean loosing intensity. no need to have to have certain height requirements for best output, because you don't have excessive heat coming from the light and not ALL the light comes from one spot and then has to spread, instead you spread the strips out further so you can bring them closer to your plants without having intensity issues. also the configuration being a bar style light you wont have issues with the fixture heating up at all. we run the light for 18hrs, shine laser thermometer on the frame from below the light source, got 34°C. 5cm away from the light source on the aluminium frame we got 29°C and at leaf surface at 15cm away it was room temperature... will get a apogee under the light asap, if anyone wants to follow up on that. now, the layout.... knowing what amount of strips you gona use and the size of tent you have to put them all in, you build a frame that can easily fit inside the tent then just space out the strips as much as possible. Next step was to cut the aluminium to the right lengths and clean up the edges. Along with the aluminium for the frame you'll need the smallest pop rivets the shop has to offer and a aluminium drill bit same size as the rivets. Now, slap the frame together. 2 long slats get a tine 45° corner cut out the flat so the fin is still in one peice, make a small cut on the other side so you're able to bend the aluminium without it snapping. grab a big 90° angle, make sure you have 2 x 90° angles. lay them together making sure all 4 corners are 90°, throw some clamps on, drill right throug the 2 corners that meet and pop them together with the rivet. Now grab a electrical junction box to hide all your wire conections, use the junction box to space out the aluminium stips, making sure you can fit enough strips on to accommodate all the LED strips needed. using a pensil, mark out where the aluminium strips lay and number them 1 - X and mark the frame with numbers corresponding to the strip that goes there. drill holes in all the aluminium strips where you need to pop them to the frame, put them back on the frame using the numbers to see where each one goes, use the hole im the aluminium strip to mark where you need to drill into the frame, drill all the marked points, lay them out, pop them in. here is what ours looked like at this point. BOOOM!!!!! got a digikey box in the mail It's all there and all undamaged! Now that we have the driver. it's time to build a bracket to hold the driver in place. same like we built the square for the frame, just a small one, like this.... -note the corners driver still has some space to move around, but sits nice and snug, we ended up putting two small self tap screws throug the screw slots at the bottom of the driver to hold it in place, didn't get photos of it, but did get photos of how we attached the bracket to the frame, using two small peices of aluminium and popping them onthe the fins upside down we now had a flat surface to mount the bracket onto. like this... Here's where we're at now, Time to make this big boy easy to hang! 5.5mm threaded hooks with 2 self locking nuts, one screwed all the way to the top and one to hold it in place. Time to slap on some double sided thermal tape, this tape can hold up to 60kg at 120°C.... or so it sais..... so it should work! AND YOU KNOW WHAT COMES AFTER THE THERMAL TAPE!!!!! FUCK YEAH step by step getting there!!! now for the fun part, the wire nightmare.... luckily I have OCD-AF and find great therapy in wire management! we also quickly reaslised that we're going to need more than one junction box, easy peasy, the driver has 2 outputd so slap another one on the other side of the driver and have half the wires one side of the light and other half on the other side. I got so carried away with finishing up the light I never took a photo of what the wiring looked like when I was finished, but that was by far the most satisfying thing about the whole build. when time came to plug the bitch in I was just focussing on the damn light. here she is in all her pride and glory here she is lighting up the tent, and this is where she'll be for the next 10 years probably. hopefully. it's a 1mx1m frame in a 1.2m x 1.2m tent - fits perfect. those intetested in the wire work if you wana see what it looks like I'll lower the light to take a couple photos, otherwise this last photo will show just how hidden and tucked away everything is. not one loose hanging wire, no excessive wires, no bulky no extras. Now to answer some questions..... LED Strips - R3831 Driver - R2300 Import Tax - R1500 Aluminium - R600 Thermal tape - R200 Ratchet ropes x 2 - R300 Those are all the more expensive parts of the build, the other stuff like hooks, wires, wago connectors, cable ties + hooks for wire management, pop rivets all those things gona work out +/- another R500 Let's say all in all = R9231 that's that. buddy got 3 x Peanut Butter Breath cuts and 3 x Canna Health Genetic #21 cuttings under that light, potted in FF premium classic, will post few updates here as things progress. have a good weekend all!

160 is a bit big. I use 150 to pre sif and use 120 and 75 for the 2 qualities of hash. If you have good material to work withm you should get a good amount of 75 micron hash. My sifs fit nice into each other, so is a one shake for all qualities. You have to work cold, to warm and all just sticks together and messes up your sifs. Dry ice helps to make all a bit more easy and adds time to process.

Yes when Led was still kak expensive it was worth building your own lights. But with Lumii Black 720w coming into The market it will be hard to build something for cheaper than that.

So. Everything is looking good. I have 4 Bobby’s Widow u and going. I still have hope for the 5th one to join the club. The 6th one’s tap root had issues.

A friend inherited a really nice press so I'd like to make use of all the frosty sugar leaves and trim I've been getting lately out of my harvests and make some dab. I want to reach outer space.

Thanks man we got these strips in 3000K. no doubt you're right about the red diodes making the difference. you have a good plan there, I haven't thought about that, yet. I am now, though my bar LED in my flower tent is just over 300W also 3000K, but it's the LM561C diodes. I can let the plants come within 5 to 10 cm of the light without light stress, cz it's so soft, then you get good penetration. I pull average about 80 to 100g off a plant in a 0.2m space. but I am sure it will be even better with the deep / far red diodes I have 5 plants in a 1m x 1m tent, giving each plant 0.2m2. I've harvested 3 batches flowered under this light. everytime I hit between 400 to 500g. that's more than 1g/W I have a perpetual cycle, I have found if my flowering ladies take long to finish up I leave the veg area running for longer and ending up with bigger plants and also bigger yield, landing more on the side of 500g and times when I move smaller plants into flower I land more on the side of 400g. so I guess that's also a contributing factor. but then like you said, bud quality..... we want those golf ball rock buds. I guess that's where the red diodes come in to make the biggest difference. I think the little bit it adds to the spectrum provides the plant with a certain chemical or causes a certain chemical reaction in the plant that it benefits from. it's only natural, though. If you think about sunlight it is literally a mix of everything, it's the fullest of full spectrums out there and that's what the plant wants and it pumps full power. not a certain amount of power being devided amongst different spectrum outputs. it's full blast everything. if we could replicate that, it would be amazing, but for now adding deep / far red diodes to a 3000K is already one step closer. plus we know it's not all about spectrum, some LEDs have a fuller spectrum, but less of other stuff and the configuration is shit then the light doesn't perform. example of this is the far red and IR diodes I have in my blurple light. they don't mean shit, just cause the rest of the light is shit I'll let the guy finish a grow with that light on his own, let him play around with it, will take a look at the results and report everything then see what we gona do to improve

Wow... and respect!

Very nice build man. Very nice. I did a build like this not too long ago but I went for the bigger strips. Their measurements were 1100mm in length so was perfect for my 1200mm tent. Plus I only did 4x bars of 3 strips each. I just recently harvested 2 batches of 1 strain under 2 different lights. The one is the 480w diy build off of LEDgardener and the other a bought 480w from kingbrite. I must admit. With all the effort and time spent making a light (which is a fun process) I found it was cheaper to buy from kingbrite. None the less fun experience. One thing I want to mention is that with my previous harvest I found the Kingbrite light produced more nugs of good density than the DIY. Wether it is the penetration of light, or the red diodes on the kingbrite, I am not sure. I kind of think it is the red diodes because both lights are 3500K (What K are the strips you got?).So with my next batch under the DIY I will be lollipopping very close to the top to make sure all light penetrates. I am looking at getting 3x bloom booster lights from kingbrite. Still thinking about it. They are 30w red diode lights which I think could fit inbetween my existing light strips which are 3 spaces. Perfect. Only problem is they sell them seperately. I will try convince them to send me 3x lights on one 90w driver instead of 3x 30w drivers. Will see if I can add it to the DIY. Maybe they would sell me the strips seperate and I will just source the correct driver. Anyway. Just a thought. But definitely let your friend know to clean those babies up when flowering. He won't regret it. I could definitely get over 400g of proper prime nugs from that light. Very nice build. Looking forward to what comes out of it.

Possibilities are endless, really. Just another step towards lowering wastage I guess. Pressing some dabs out of it was my initial thought.

I ended up scrapping the idea for now, told myself I'd look in to it for the next harvest but have missed that window already. Maybe the next 1 .

I took a set of sift trays from Hydroworks. I have a 73micron and 160micron. It may sound nuts but I barely have anything that comes through the 73. So I just use the 160. I also have bubble hash bags which I got from them too which I love. They are my favourite. I will brobably go bigger and get bags from Hashitall. Reason I mention the bags is because I press my own hash rosin with the bubble. I get much higher yields off my bubble. I think I just suck at the dry sifting. What do you want to do with your sift?