DIY 3w LED grow light – Finishing touches

With most of the hard work done (see earlier posts) it’s now just a matter of attaching the drivers to the heat sink and wiring everything together. I used the tabs on the drivers to fasten them to the heat sink with some 3.5mm stainless wood screws (yeah, wood screws). I first drilled a 3mm hole between the aluminum profiles, then fastened the drivers on. You could also use some hot glue, but this was easy enough for me and is removable if I need to replace some drivers or something like that.

Next thing you need to do is connect the drivers to power and to the LEDs. I used some house electrical connectors I had lying around, but you can also solder or wrap the wires together. Whatever works for you and is safe. Another very important thing is grounding the heat sink. Do it before you plug everything into the wall! By connecting the ground to the heat sink you are making sure that if you made a mistake somewhere and have live electricity leading into the heat sink it will trip the circuit breaker immediately and you won’t get electrocuted. If you don’t connect the ground to the heat sink and made a mistake somewhere with your wiring then you might shock yourself. Please be safe 🙂

Then it’s just a matter of plugging everything in and seeing if it works. Here I had already put the 60 degree lenses on. Makes the light a bit easier on the eyes. Some lenses didn’t sit tight enough on the LEDs so I just went ahead and put a dab of hot glue on each lens so it wouldn’t fall of. The lenses are still removable with the hot glue.

Yay! It works! Next up was running the lights for a while and see if the heat sink will get hot. After about 30-60 minutes I noticed that it was a tad warmer than I wanted it to be, so I added some fans to keep it cool. The fans are just normal 120mm computer case fans I had lying around and I power them up with a 12v wall wart I also had. You can run most computer fans at 7-12v DC, so if you have an old charger or something around then that might be enough to run the fans.

Then it’s just a simple matter of trying to keep the wires tidy and putting the lights above some plants!

The plants I have are basil, chilies, parsley, rosemary and some lettuce. I have some seedlings that I’ll add soon, and I will be moving the plants to a single ebb & flow container, as opposed to the DWC they are in now. But that’s something for another post 🙂

Here’s a small orange Trinidad Scorpion chili seedling that I moved under the LEDs. This pic was taken on April 6th, and I’ll post some weekly(ish) growth updates to document the growth under the DIY grow light.

Here’s the same seedling a week later (April 13th)

I have no idea if that’s considered good growth in a week or what, but at least it’s growing!