high power LED grow lights M.k2

Step 6 Mounting the leds

The LED's get exceptionally hot, without some kind of heat sink they'll die on you, and you'll probably need a larger heat sink than you think, I chose to use the metal box I used to enclose the electronics as the heat sink, it's quite a bulky piece of meal, but it gets surprisingly hot, I'd recommend you use some thing larger.

The LED's I got had a star type heat sink attached to them, this makes it a bit easier to mount them, i marked out some fairly random positions and used some small bolts to hold the LED's in place, it would be a good idea to use some thermal paste to improve the heat conduction if you happen to have any lying around.

Comments

[codyg102]

Best affordable heat sink materials are (in order) copper, then aluminum - in case anyone's wondering.

Proper thermal compound will vastly improve heat transfer (if you doubt that one, try running a computer processor without thermal material between the proc and heat sink... smoke will probably soon follow... and not the good kind ;-) ).

[jarvist]

If you don't have any heatsink compound, use some toothpaste - its still 100x better than having the inevitable air gap (ran my Core2 Intel CPU for a few months...). Just use a tiny amount an smear the LED around to get a nice coating. You might want to clean + wipe the box nicely first to ensure a good flat connection.

[}{itch]

Cheers! thats an excellent suggestion. Never would of thought to try toothpaste. I bet you CPU smelled minty fresh :D