Are Chinese LEDs ANY different than American?

[SantaMonica]

No failures yet with these: www.ledgroupbuy.com/deep-red-660nm

[Floyd R Turbo]

my opinion - $1.99 for grab-box emitters, meaning you might get 630nm, you might get 670nm, you might get high brightness, you might not. that's why they're cheap. $3.40 for Steve's http://shop.stevesleds.com/Philips-L...S-Deep-Red.htm which are the best bin, highest brightness that Philips offers - specifically selected. bottom line, you get what you pay for. we're talking about $1 per LED and most need a dozen or so. It's like buying a full aquarium setup and having a custom acrylic tank built, and going with a thinner wall material because it saves a buck, when in the long run that makes for a weaker tank that will bow more and cause more problems over time, yet it's the most important thing in your entire system.

So buy the cheap ones if you want to just know what you're getting

BTW cree doesn't make a deep red 660, just 630.

[chriswf]

The only LEDs I've had trouble with are CREE XR-E royal blues. I've had to replace about 20% of them on my display lights in two years. My scrubber lights are a mix of Epistar, EpiLED and no-name Chinese, and I haven't had any failures.

Crap. I bought 2 Cree XR-E blues off rapid.
Bought my reds from some site I found on here. Someone said he had been using them, and they were working great.
Here they are:
http://www.satisled.com/3w-high-powe...70nm_p433.html

Power supply from RAPID.

And heat sinks - some that someone linked on ebay here, they were like 11$ each.


For wiring, I'll run all my reds parallel, then my blues in a series circuit right?
I know the differences in wiring parallel and series. And I know what the differences will actually do to the lighting. (A lot similar to car audio, how you wire it can change the ohms).

I'm still reading about wiring and spacing.
As far as spacing, from my understanding I'll be doing 4" from the center of each LED.
I'm definitely planning it slowly, since my RED LEDs won't show up for a while because it's the Holidays and they came from another country too lol.