Well, I've been scheming with Kyle at Sapphire Aquatics to set up a new rimless ~25g glass aquarium and as such I wanted to come up with a lighting solution that would look good clean and put out enough juice to do what I want with the tank. I decided to ultimately go with a pendant style fixture retrofitted with one of our custom designed heatsinks and loaded with Cree LEDs.

I've gone with LEDs on two separate circuits. One circuit is running 12x CREE XRE-WG-Q5 on Star and 2x Red Crees. The other circuit is running 14x CREE XRE-RB on Star. I plan to run the fixture 8-10" off the water (not sure yet) with 40 or 60 degree optics. I will be running 2x Meanwell ELN-60-48D drivers that I plan to hook up to my Reefkeeper Elite w/ ALC module (once it's available).

Here are some pictures of the retro so far. I have additional plans for the fixture, but here's a teaser. Don't mind the wiring. This is a prototype
































This PAR rating is WITHOUT optics directly on top of a JBJ 24g tank. In contrast, a 150w HQI puts out about 150 par in our testing. Also note that our PAR meter does NOT account for much of the blue light that the LEDs are putting out so the PAR ratings should be higher than they read.




If you look carefully you can see the effects of the additional red LEDs


Sapphire's custom rimless 24"L x 16"W x 14"H build in progress. Soon to have center overflow and dual drains.


Video in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmBU7qoDkg


Chris may want to chime in with the power regulation settings we used.

We are waiting for the meanwells to arrive, so we were only able to test with a Single ELN-60-48D. Since the strings were already wired in series, we put the 2 Sets into parallel and hooked up the Meanwell. The Single color shots are at around 1200ma. After both pairs were in series, the current got split, so the shots you see with both sets lit up is at about 600mA.

More meanwells are showing up friday and after that bunch is gone, they are OOS until Next year.

Chris

We would expect the par to be around 350+ once we get 2 meanwells into the mix. This is also not compensating for the response curve for the apogee (counts blues with less weight than it should).

Chris

Nice Work! Can't wait to see it finished.

What are the RED LED's for anyway?

Is this something you guys are planning on making for the masses?

Holy crap!

OMG, my viper will be on sale right away......please do this Or make a retro fit for the viper 70 watt please

We are planning retros for sunpods and other fixtures too. The beauty of our low profile heatsink is that it is adaptable to many many fixtures. Nick picked the hamilton out for his special project and without any major mods to the 3.6/5.6 heatsinks for the AIOs, we were able to find mounting locations for it.

The CNC and Solidworks Thermal tools have been a godsend to the development of the LEDs.

I also forgot to have nick take pictures of the 2 x 80mm silenx fans providing the airflow we need to keep these buggers efficient.

Based on my calcs, the heatsink shouldnt exceed 140F (way below 160 they are L70 rated for).

If people want it, why not, right? It was something I thought of for my own personal tank, but considering there aren't too many other options on the market for something like this it may give people another choice.

Id be really interested in something like this for my 12g cad

I think it should definitely be something on your guys' radar over at NanoCustoms to produce these for the masses

Ditto. What is the benifit to red?

Some pictures of the heatsink mounting.

pls report PAR reading when it's all up.

Little bit different color rendering. Helps pick up some reds and pinks in some corals. Also adds a slight purple tint to the light. Most of the time, the red in the cool whites is enough to bring out most of the colors.

Want.

Interesting. I've been disappointed how my light make my orange zoas look dull brown.
Maybe I experiment with them.

I heard that algae will grow under reds. Is this a concern for you guys?

It's all about not using it in excess. Yes, red light grows algae, but with the high amount of blue light in the tank, most everything should out compete the algae. Nutrient control is just as important here as it is with any other light source. The reds are relatively low output compared to the whites and royals.

I want for my viper(70 watt), money ready to be spent thanks

Are you guys running the reds at 1000mA?

The PAR shots were taken at 600mA (two parallel strings). Once new drivers are in, they will be run at 1000mA.

I thought the cree reds had a 700mA max. It would be nice if it can run at 1A. That would save me a whole lot of problems

HMMM? Cree says the red (XR-C) max current is 700mA. I've not seen a red that can handle 1A.

More suprisingly - that array achieved 220 PAR @ 600mA without optics!?! I'm speachless...

Most likely, the Reds will be brought over to a 350ma driver. We added them to see how many LEDs we could get on a string. We have had supplier nightmares with the rampup of the new products we have and as such, we've been out of alot of stuff we normally should have.

Chris

The pair of reds can be run in parallel together to drop the current over each LED.

I know everybody is interested in the LED build but here is an update on the aquarium.

I don't want to spill the beans for Nick but the plan is two Koralia #1 12 volt controllable pumps inserted into the two holes in the overflow.

Stop posting that in here and get back to working on my tank! **CRACKS THE WHIP**

Looks nice Kyle. Are you going to put shrouds over the Koralias to stop them from sucking air from the overflow?

No, we are building a stand pipe to keep the water level set perfectly set near the top of the top of the tank. The water will only drop 1/2" from the overflow slots to the water down below so there should not be any air pulled into the Koralias.

If u are planning on selling the tank. how muich will it go for?

I believe ultimately Sapphire (Kyle) is looking to make it available for resale at some point in the near future. That being said, if we can keep this discussion related to the lighting that would be good. I plan to make an additional thread within the next couple days (maybe tonight) in the member's aquariums section that will be a broad topic regarding this tank/fixture combo.

Thanks.

does this not having a controler for the leds circumvent the orbitec patent? from reading it it seems they only have the rights to ones that use a controler. just interested thats all.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=mwWAAAAAE...;q=&f=false

It's the bigger target. Technically, they are patenting the use of LEDs over a reef for keeping marine life, but that's going to be a tough one ot uphold in court. The controller issue was the big one that they went after PFO for.

If the above includes the 12" single Satellite (~10 LEDs?), count me in for a pre-order/order/beta test/whatever. I'll even send in mine for measuring/testing/fitment if it comes back to me with LEDs on it (after I pay of course).

I finally finished up the remote ballast box the other day for the pendant. I'm running 2x Meanwell ELN-60-48D drivers (one for whites and one for blues) and then I'm running an 18w 700mA driver on its own just for the 2x red LEDs. I've got pictures of the driver install that I'll post up a little later on once I get them uploaded.

The unit is fully functional now and all I need to do now is get a cover plate to go over the bottom of the fixture to cover the heatsink/wiring, etc. I decided to go with 60 deg. optics for the whites and blues and 80 deg. for the two reds.

PAR numbers are INSANE with this thing. Just to give some sort of reference we sat the fixture on top of the Nanocube 24g tank (just like in the youtube video) and at full blast we were getting over 500 PAR. I brought the fixture home and was playing around with it this morning to determine what sort of heights I want to work with on the fixture in relation to the new tank.

Now, keep in mind this new tank is going to be 14"H. At approximately ~20-21"H I was still getting ~350 PAR. At 24" (roughly 10" from the top of the water in the new tank) I was still getting 250-280 PAR. Oh and one last thing. The whites and blues are only running at 9v right now since I have the dimmer wires on the 2x Meanwells hooked up to some spare 3-12v adapters we had at the shop since I don't have an ALC for the ReefKeeper yet... not to mention my RKE is still running my 12DX until the new tank is ready.

I will attempt to get some sort of pictures, etc. It's just tough by yourself since It's hard to hold the camera and the fixture at the same time since I don't have it mounted yet. I'm going to try to locate parts for that today.

So here are some photos of the pendant mounted with a few PAR numbers as well and also a few pictures of the external "ballast box" setup.


For those who don't know, there are two screws inside the Meanwell drivers that allow you to calibrate the max/min output settings.


This particular setup has three switches. 1x royal blue, 1x white and 1x reds.


All finished up. Plenty of wires... that's for sure.

Now the pendant.






























At dead center with all three sets of lights on at 9.0v the fixture is putting out ~300 PAR. At 27" it's putting out about 250 PAR. On the left/right edges at 27" it's still putting out around 50 PAR and front/back edges (where the tank will be) it's getting about 100 PAR.

Well, it's been a loooong time since any sort of update. This project isn't dead in the water, but there have been some setbacks. Unfortunately some tweaks needed to be made to the tank that Kyle @ Sapphire Aquatics made for me so he's going to actually send me a new one out so I can send the other one back. So for almost the last six weeks or so I've had a giant bin on my living room floor with a bunch of water and rock in it.

To clear up some floor space I decided to get a heavy duty bin from the hardware store and transfer the water and rock into that so I could at least get some light over it until the new tank shows up in an attempt to hopefully grow some coraline on the rocks. Why it took me six weeks to decide to do this is beyond me. Well, actually, I didn't realize I was going to be waiting this long so I guess that's part of it.

Anywho... I decided to also take the opportunity while I was at it to finish up my fixture and re-work the hanging mounts for the pendant.

See pics below, but basically I picked up some black acrylic and cut out a pattern to cover up as much of the heatsink and wiring as possible. This is not perfect since this is a total one-off project and functional prototype. In the future we'll have a perfectly designed heatsink with appropriate spacing between all LEDs so that we can cut a piece of acrylic to have holes cut in it that snugly fit around each of the LED optics. Trust me, it'll look sweet. But, given that my heatsink was one of our off-the-shelf heatsinks for other retros and the holes were laid out by hand, etc. there is some human error involved and so I did the best I could.

I also went with longer hanging arms so that the fixture will hang more over the center of the tank once I have it (14" instead of 11"). I decided to hang a couple loops of 1/16" cable down from each arm and create a couple of quick release clips so that if I need/want to remove the pendant I can just unclip it instead of having the arms tied directly to the fixture like I did before. I didn't think it through well the first time.

I'm currently running only the blues and whites at 4.5v to provide lower light in hopes of getting some nice coloration on the rocks. Pictures below include B/W @ 4.5v, B/W @ 4.5v + 2x reds at full intensity (can't dim those ones) and finally B/W @ 9.0v and 2x reds at full. The reds do tend to make it pretty red looking. It's hard to say what it'll look like until I finally have a tank to look at with everything on. The camera also makes everything look a little more purple than it really is. My B/W combo (w/o red) looks very much like a 20k HQI. The bin is actually almost exactly the size of the tank and the fixture is about 12" off the top of the bin in the photos (26" to the bottom of the bin).



















Blue and white only @ 4.5v


Blue and white @ 4.5v and red at full


Blue, white and red at full intensity


My new tank!!

If anybody's curious how this is turning out you can check out the link below:

http://www.nano-reef.com/forums/index.php?...15496&st=40