10W LED Light Project - Walkthrough

[whatever]

would you make me a 2-white 1-blue for a 2.5 NR I'm setting up? Don't need a splash shield though. PM me price.. Thanks-

[whatever]

Would it have been easier/cost efficient to buy a heat sink?

[Watashi]

Depends on the size of the heatsink. if you just need a 3-4" square sure 15$ @newegg.com you can probably find something. But due to the dimensions finding a heatsink premade was closer to 40-50$.

If I can find some old computers that I can steal the CPU heatsink out of I can probably put this together a bit cheaper, but thats the only thing I can think of.

[willp2]

If you're talking about the 3 of these same 1.2W LED's, you'd need very little heatsink. maybe a piece of aluminum bar or U channel would would be more than enough. It won't look as nice as what you built here, but that is really not a lot of heat to get rid of.

[Watashi]

My previous comment was in the mind set of the 2x8" heat sink. Yes I agree for a 3 light you could use to simpler piece of aluminum.

[ReggieF]

With no experience I built my own LED light and it was super easy. Total cost was $120 for 15 watts of Cree LEDs. I documented everything in this thread.

Edit: Building an LED light can be super cheap if you DIY and you know what parts to get and how to assemble everything. It took a while to learn this info, but if anyone has any questions, they can pm me and ask them... it's really not that hard at all, you just need the knowledge. I could've easily built a light that's 2-3x stronger for almost the same price. Anyone that wants the cost / performance of a DIY LED and doesn't want to solder can take a look at these light strips, which are a great deal and they come with an instructional youtube video (hehe) that shows just how easy they are.