Yes, LED's is what I meant .wisewendell; LEDs Man, L E D s not bulbs.
Have at it. You should use U channel though NOT tubing.
Nice report on the XM-L, are you able successfully fit XP-G optics over them? Like carlco? I noticed that my carlco XP-series optics leave quite a bit of space between the emitter and the lens when they're snapped on.
I calculated that you could drive 15 XM-L on one Meanwell ELN60-48 at 1300 mA producing a total of 7350 lumen. Or 16 at 1000 mA producing 6048 lumen.
But indead the color, that's the big question for now...
Yes, LED's is what I meant .
What is the advantage of U-Channel over tubing? I figured since there was more surface area the tubing would be better?
Great thread - incredibly helpful! Unfortunately, I don't trust my handiwork when it comes to electicity and water. I am curious though - Now that you folks pioneered amazing work and researched parts all the way to end of the Internet, what commercial LED fixture company do you think makes the best lights by performance & value for SPS?
Great thread - incredibly helpful! Unfortunately, I don't trust my handiwork when it comes to electicity and water. I am curious though - Now that you folks pioneered amazing work and researched parts all the way to end of the Internet, what commercial LED fixture company do you think makes the best lights by performance & value for SPS?
I got ahold of an XM-L. I fed 700mA to it and was suitably impressed. Make that VERY impressed.
Besides the crazy amount of light - 260 lumens - that it spewed, I was impressed by the fact that I could hold it in my fingers without it getting noticeably warm. This means that if you ran XM-Ls at 700mA you could use a really minimal heatsink scheme.
I did screw it to a small stamped heatsink and cranked it up to 2A. That was 650 lumens or about 1/2 a 100W light bulb!! That started to warm up the heatsink a bit.
I'd probably consider 1.5A to be a good working maximum for the XM-Ls. That would still allow fairly lean heatsinking without a concern-able lifetime impact.
I can't see using them without optics though. The wide dispersion of so much light will have a lot of light hitting places it shouldn't.
I dropped some optics on it that included 25, 20, 15, and 5 degrees. They all made a great spot on the ceiling 5 feet above.
Any of those spots would make a great bike light with only the one XM-L. I didn't have any proper optics though. These were for LumiLEDs. They are the plastic cones with a recessed hole that fits down over the LED. They result in just about zero leakage out the sides. Anyway using proper optics and mounting them above the tank a foot or two would be great. You could crank the factors up to maybe 20sqin/LED.
Even with good and proper air movement? My dad builds computers on the side so I have tons of fans and 12v power supplies laying around.Widdy; I don't have any Carlo's. I hope you're not saying the XP Carlos hold the optics out forward a lot. That is the total reason these otherwise perfect optics, I have, don't work. Their holder holds them out forward too far.
These XM-Ls are now going to allow one string to use all of the ELN60-48s output effectively.
However it means we can't mix blues in with them anymore. On small builds you could run one ELN for the XMs and maybe run two blue strings in parallel on the other. This would give 33%:67%. Problem is, it may now take 25%:75% XM-L:XP-E. (head scratching)
U-channel is about 3 times better at dumping the heat than square tubing. The "back" side of the tube blocks all the other inside faces from radiating away their heat. That same face stymies all the convection possibilities too.
ShallowWaters; You're really asking in the wrong place. I don't think any of us even care. So we don't really know.
That's pretty sweet Widdy.
wisewendell; It's very hard to even get good air flow with tubing.