LED Lighting - DIY vs Premade Fixtures

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by ponokareefer

I'm shocked you didn't save any money on yours compared to radions. My costs are looking to be about half of any other fixture out there, and more than half on radions.

I spent well over $1500 on mine and that's before the controller I just added. I had to do a little R&D to find out how much or certain colors I needed to add to get the effect I wanted without causing negative effects so I did buy a few more LEDs than I needed but not that much more. I will also admit I think I added more LEDs than I actually needed but again it's a somewhat unknown variable and a little experimenting is needed, all costs money. Then you have to consider the time envolved in building it, mine time was huge, if I spent the same time working some extra hours at work I would be able to buy many Radions with the extra cash. Then when you're all done you gotta go buy a $400 par meter just see what level to run the thing at.

The radions are only about $750 each, everything is done and figured out for you and you'll even find PAR reading on line for various outputs. All you have to do is just plug them in and they even come with warranty.

So it's a no brainer for me at this point but if you really enjoy spending your time building such things then it may be worth while but other than that it's hard to see an upside to DIY these days.

There's also no way you could replicate a radion for less or even close to half the cost. 120W of the latest and greatest LEDs will run you upwards of $200, 5 independent PWM drivers will run you another $200, then the heatsink, wire, fasteners, fans, grease and all the other stuff will run you over $100. So you're already over $500, then add your controller which is also wireless on the radion with nice software that anyone could use. You'd need a 5 channel Arduino controller and the ability to code in C+ language to do a standard wired version and that's already $200+. Plus think about what that will actually look like when it's done, it won't be pretty And that doesn't include the nice reflector the radions have to create better color mesh and single point effect.