Welcome to BLF, BLFD80 ! We talk too much over here, it is refreshing to see someone more concise :party:
I received my S2+ UV from GearBest today. It’s quite a bit more powerful than the 2AA UV flashlight I bought a few years ago in terms of making things fluoresce. I have a 18350 tube inbound for it. It’s fun to play with, which was all the reason I needed to buy it. 
Tonight I wanted to repeat last nights hornworm extermination but only found 2 of them. Both smaller than 1” in length. For those who don’t know, they can get quite large. I remember seeing them approx’ 75mm in length and I’m being conservative. At that size they do significant damage. But I think their poop is bouncing off lower leaves and that glows also.
You are correct on the damage hornworms do. I had a hornworm eat over 1/2 of a 4 foot tall pepper plant one year. I found him later on another bush. About 5 inches in length and a good inch in diameter. Needless to say….I squished him and other critters ate him…. RIP
Despite my dislike of doing this (I screwed up!) I had Aliexpress send me my UV pass filter. I don’t know that it made the output much different, but the look of the light is just too cool for school! Now I have a spare clear lens for any other S2+.
(forgive me for posting in a zombie-like thread but…)
Question: does the emitter in this Convoy totally outclass a generic UV emitter such as this?
If so then my next question is how well does it throw? Note, one of my intended uses is to shine ~50+” into my backyard from the inside of a closed glass sliding patio door. Would this Convoy work well? As such I’m already a weirdo that likes to shine my regular lights into the backyard whilst indoors. I get a kick outta seeing the raccoons thinking “…cmon weirdo ur hurting my eyes…”
If this Convoy would work well then I’m not even going to bother building a UV light. I like the look of this Convoy…
I always purchase directly from Simon at Shenzhen Convoy, Convoy is one of my favorites and I have many including the Convoy UV 365nm/Nichia...
For more throw I also have a Led Engin...
bah, i just want a royal purple s2+ that so much to ask :weary:
Yes the Nichia emitter Simon is using here is much better than most “generic” UV emitters. Its got a lot cleaner output and a lot less white light leakage - not zero, but a lot less. Its definitely a lot better than the stuff approaching 400nm like the one you linked. That thing will be purple, not just UV.
Its not a throwy host, so no its not a great UV “thrower”. 50 ft isn’t much though. It would probably work pretty well at that distance. However, I’d be really careful about shining it at a closed glass door. That’s going to reflect a lot of UV back toward you, and that’s not good.
EDIT: I dug up these two photos I took to show the difference in wavelength:
365nm Chinese emitter:
400nm Chinese emitter:
Note that neither of these are the Nichia emitter Simon’s using here. It would be very similar to the 365nm emitter pictured but with less white light “leakage”. I don’t have any photos handy of what it would look like; sorry.
Thank you for those pics. They were very helpful.
Yes, I had concerns about the UV light being reflected back from the glass panel. In general I was looking to get a pair of budget priced UV blocking glasses to use with the light. Do you think budget priced ones will work well? or just shell for a decent priced pair (after all these are our eyes we’re talking about.)
Also as I had a few generic C8 hosts lying around (not great quality but w/ deep reflectors I think they would make a decent UV throwing light that needn’t be babied.)
I’m starting to think think I should just consider getting this Convoy & put its UV emitter into a throwier host. In the process the Convoy would then be a host for something else. What do you think about those plans? I’m thinking it might work out better than just getting that UV Led but myself. I don’t see how I could get it for a decent price by myself. Has any owners of this UV Convoy taken a look inside to see how accessible the parts are? Thanks!
I took a good UV light into my local Home Depot, found a white package that fluoresced nicely and carried it over to the eyewear section. Holding each set of UV safety glasses between my UV light and the white packaging, I could see that every single one of them blocked all the UV I could detect by eye - that white package completely stopped fluorescing when I put the safety glasses in between. So I bought a cheap pair that felt good on my face. I think they all probably work very well.
I think your plan to do the emitter swap is a solid one. Getting the emitter out of an S2+ is super simple; that won’t be an issue. The S2+ is going to have a 16mm mcpcb in it while your C8 is going to be 20mm, so there’s that to contend with. But its definitely not a hard problem to solve. It would be quite simple to build up your C8 as a UV thrower and then have the empty S2+ host left over for another project (triples are fun… 
).
I just picked up a S2+ host and ordered a Lite-On UV led that djozz maxed out at 2a. I also ordered a 1.5a buck driver for it. Hopefully it’ll sling out a lot of UV.
It is correct that almost all plastic glasses block 365nm UV, because the common plastic used for impact protection glasses is polycarbonate which by nature has a cut-off frequency of 400nm. So for 400nm light they are not suitable, you need the ‘yellow’ or ‘amber’ glasses for that.
Thanks for the solid 411
Surprisingly I follow you although I have a feeling you could have gone ultra technical & left me scratching my head like an ape.
In any case I also appreciate your 411. Thanks!
FWIW, there are plenty of items in most every home in the US today that will fluoresce under UV. No need to go to a big box store unless you just happen to be there anyway.
I checked my polycarbonate lenses and yes they block the UV, my wifes glasses also do, but since they are self darkening she had dark circles in the lenses with just a few seconds of the intense exposure.
Yeah I just meant that I found something that fluoresced in the store for my testing purposes rather than bringing something in with me. Fluorescent items are everywhere and easy to find.
S2+ Nichia emitter
with filter
Without
Black Friday = Blacklight on sale at BG
Black host 1 mode $15.69 and the 36bgc8 code takes another $2.35 off
SMM
EDIT: see observations below before you pull the trigger on this one.
Possibly a fake. It doesn’t say if it has the Nichia emitter or not. The one I got from Simon came with one plus a black switch boot. It’s also just a single mode unlike the version banggood is selling.
I just noticed it’s an S2, not an S2+.