LED Lighting - DIY vs Premade Fixtures

[sphelps]

You don't need a par meter with most purchased fixtures because typically the company gives your the par readings so you already have your base line, plus there's quite a few people already out there taking and posting various par readings with these fixtures, you'd be somewhat redundant to take them yourself. With DIY it's not that simple, so many variable like number of LEDs, type, operating current, drivers, lenses, heat transfer, controller output, ect. You don't really have a base line and you don't know what effects over time will be. You could always guess and check but corals can be expensive experiments.

Also keep in mind comparing a typical DIY build to fixtures like radions and other high end ones isn't always a good comparison. If you're going to omit all the features that these come with then don't add that to your savings. I could also build a go cart that would be pretty fun and get me from A to B but it wouldn't be fair to say I saved $200K cause I didn't buy a Ferrari. With Radions for example will your fixture have 5 channels of PWM control for 5 colors? Will you have specialty designed reflectors? Will you have wireless control? Will you even be using the same LEDs?

Mark, for your example you should compare it to 6 AI sol modules which without a controller will cost you around the same as your DIY build.