Another DIY LED Light Unit

Hi Guys and Girls

Yes Another Thread on diy leds. I bet you guys are tired of every second guy trying to build a led light unit. ( and some do succeed) So here is my try.
please feel free to comment PLEASE as all help and suggestions are welcome.

So here goes: I got some industrieal reflector from a scrapyard for free( that's where the idea of a light came from ). So I riveted two of them together and was very pleased with how it looked.

Then I decided to go the led route. Here I please want your input, cause I'm not sure how many leds to put in. Here is a list of led I ordered:

3W cool white 6500k X 18
3W pure white 8000k - 15000k X 9
10W Aqua Marine Royal blue X 2
60 degree lenses X 27

Do you think this will be too much or not enough?
OOhhh almost forgot to say my tank is a 4ft 270l 500mm deep


Here are some pics of my unit so far.

 

Sorry I see the pics uploaded in reverse order.

 

@llewellynkearney, Good workmanship is always appreciated, so keep the info and pics coming. If I may ask, how much did you pay for those LEDs, and how are you going to drive them?

Also, it may or may not be of interest to you, but I slapped together some calculations for some other guys here in the forum ago to calculate the height/spread of an LED given the beamwidth etc. See the link below if you are interested.

Dropbox - LED Calcs.xlsx

 

hi
Thx. I paid R800.00 for everything incl. drivers. The driver I got can drive 7 - 9 3w leds and for the 10w I got a driver for each.

Thx for the link, I will have a look.

 

Nice build. Thanks for sharing

 

Thx gavin

 

What I would do is use @JJFury s led calculator to work out the spread of of your light with those lenses. Then you know how far to space those 6500k and 8000k led,to get an even coverage, Install those first and see what effect it has.

 

Yip that's what I'm busy doing. Thx alot

 

Just a small lil update. I'm getting all my leds, drivers, heatsinks and 60 deg. lenses tomorrow. So guess what I'll be doing all night tomorrow night.

 

Great!
Have you calculated how far you are going to space your leds and what colour combination are you using?

 

Yes a little. Still a figuring out how high to suspend it from the water surface. But just getting more confused the more I read up on led lighting, so decided to go with my gut. Will have to wait and see how it turns out.

 

@llewellynkearney, if you have a look at that spreadsheet that I put together, calculate the height where the beam will be exactly the front-to-back width of your tank at the surface of the water. Once the light enters the water, you will get complete internal reflection off the glass (meaning that the light do not escape through the glass). This will give you the optimum spread of light from your LED. Hope this helps.

 

@llewellynkearney looks great but if you are planning on high light i would double the wattage. Also look on your drivers and check the duty cycle since most led drivers run @85% so instead of running @ 100+- W you're only running 85% of that.
Do you have an option to turn off the 450nm led's? I would recommend this since they do meet the nm for the photo process however algae feeds on this too... watch fert & co2 levels very carefully or you will get blooms.

I would look at including a few 3w 680nm.

 

I am looking forward at seeing the final result of your DIY. Sounds really nice.

 

Got all my goodies today. connected the 15000k and wow they are bright. Also connected the 10w royal blue and I am really suprised at how bright they are. will post pics when I have connected everything

 

Pics of all the goodies

 

Hi wow! Those lights look amazing! Ok tell how much to put the set together and how does it compare to your normal t5 lights rated 6500k? Why I am asking, is because it would be interesting to know if you could grow plants under that LED strips. I have read some where that people have planted tanks with these lights but the confusion comes in when doing the rating of the bulb.

 

Hi @dash
The whole thing costed me around R750.00. And all I can say is it's awesome. Here are a before and after pic so you can see for yourself. the before lights are 5 x 30w 6500k t5 tubes.


Still need to sort out all the wires and how to suspend it. This was just a test run.