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Originally Posted by calgaryreefer
Does anyone know of a place in Calgary or even online within Canada that sells heatsinks large enough to make LED lights, I know there is a couple in the US like heatsink USA, but shipping is pretty expensive, trying to look for local to save and to support our own industries at home!!!!
Thanks.
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Wish I had better news, but when I was looking I drew a complete blank - I would've liked to get something locally, or even in Canada but found pretty much nothing. I'm instead going with a large aluminum channel with a smaller one nested inside (thermal grease between the two) and holes drilled in the bottom of the channels to allow air to rise up through instead of stagnating in the bottom of the channel. I will also be using some fans to push air up through and assist convection. I'll make it clear I don't know exactly how well this is going to work since the light is still in the build process - I will be watching temperatures closely during testing. I'm hoping this will work well since my LEDs are going to be fairly tightly spaced.
I'm also interested in the idea of using heat pipes to push the heat from individual LEDs to a number of processor coolers, each handling the heat form a number of emitters - mainly because I'm a bit of a nerd and think that heat pipes are cool.
Quote:
Originally Posted by globaldesigns
Just wondering, I have look at a few of the DIY LED setups, and everyone has huge heatsinks.
I personally am not using LED, but if LED uses less energy and has less heat creation, why such a big heatsink? Just wondering, as my MH, just have fans with no heatsinks.
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LEDs are very efficient at turning electricity into light with relatively little waste heat. That is not to say they don't produce waste heat though. The rub comes in the fact that the emitters are producing that heat in a very small space (i.e. the junction) so the energy density is high, and to make matters worse the junction needs to be kept relatively cool for reasons of efficiency and longevity. For this reason people tend to go for huge heatsinks that can soak up the heat at a prodigious rate in order to be sure those junctions are being kept cool. The bulk heat produced at the end of it will be a lot less than your MH lights which actually have to be very hot in the part of the bulb where the light is produced.
I personally suspect that these heatsinks are a little overkill, but they provide a handy broad flat surface on which to mount the emitters, and after spending hundreds on those emitters a large heatsink seems like a small price to pay for protecting the investment. Bear in mind also that most of these large, flat, finned heatsinks are by necessity mounted in the most inefficient way possible (i.e. flat, fins pointing up) with regard to convective cooling, hence the fans to offset this..
Besides, those big heatsinks just look so cool - especially if you can anodize it a funky colour!