Well I'm just about to pull the trigger on my nanocustoms order. I've been searching and reading like a maniac ever since I got this tank for Christmas. I just ordered these LED spotlights off ebay, got the idea from another fellow Edge owner



Got them from here
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...7#ht_1101wt_939

I plan on doing either a 1x6 or 2x3 LED setup to supplement the spotlights.

4x Cool White XR-E Q5s
2x XR-E RBs
1x Meanwell LPC-20-700

So what I plan on doing is either getting two 1"x6" heatsinks and epoxying them to the swingarm and put three LEDs in each heat sink in a staggered pattern like so (Pardon my drawing skills, I'm trying to draw on a touchpad with the laptop in my bed )

Like so



or, do a single row of 5 LEDs and do one royal blue in between the two spotlights ( I have a tiny individual heatsink that I borrowed off a flashlight for the individual one. I would also grind some relief cuts on the heatsink that would allow me to angle the two outermost LEDs outward like the spotlights do to help in color blending.

Like this




Which of the two would be more efficient in blending the blues and whites together?

Spotlighting isn't as much of an issue since I would be doing two islands like this gentleman did



He has a couple of VHOs above that tank, which IMO takes away from the sleek look of the tank, which is why I'm trying to keep everything enclosed in the factory hood. Cooling will be handled by a silent computer fan suspended from the light cover on a wall wart transformer.





I'm trying to keep this as sleek and PnP as possible, hence the Meanwell driver, unless you guys think a PS and Buckpuck combo would be better suited. Also, I'll note that I'd like to keep my LED limit at 6 due to money constraints. I pretty much have my mind made up but would love to hear other people's opinions.

I also forgot to ask that since nanocustoms is out of the LPC-20-700, would it be ok to get the LPC-35-1050 since they seem to have those in stock. Would the RBs be able to handle the 1050mA? Or since the light is so close to the tank, would I have problems with corals scorching at 1050mA?

That's going to be a little much for a small tank.

If evilc says it's too strong, you might wanna tone it down a bit.
LED lighting is a lot stronger than many ppl realize.

Understatement of the century.

Lol, they're just these lil bumps that light up, how much light can they put out?
:friendly sarcasm:

so what would you recommend? I thought about leaving the spotlights and just ditching the Cree idea and adding a 13 CFL bulb in there, or adding some kind of light diffuser?

Honestly, I'd go the other way and ditch the spots and keep the Crees. a 4x2 array with dimmable drivers would give you the best lighting in terms of spread, power and control.

I saw one of these tanks at a pet store today whilst in a desperate search to find stores that sell Salt water fish (I've only found one so far) Anyway I thought it was a pretty smart looking nano tank but how on earth do you clean the inside of the glass, remove alge ect...

I stood staring puzzled at the tank for about 5 mins trying to figure it out. So Im curious how do you do it?

magnet cleaner

Ahhhh makes sense

This rig is pretty dad gone sweet if you ask me. The lighting blows to death though. Came to NR just for this thread today. Specefically, Evil. Have you seen this thing in real life? If so, whet do you think would/could be possible for the given amount of space in that little hood? The tank is on sale right now for $100, but if I can't get some LEDs for it I would never get it. What say evil?

A custom LED setup is pretty much the only way to light the tank effectively for a reef while keeping the stock look of the tank. Even then, the lighting isn't perfect. Cool tank, but a lot of work to get it set for a reef.

Yeah, I knew that. One sort of semi-major problem
is that all must fit inside the little hood which also houses the filter. So the problem is one of light distribution throught the entire surface of the bottom of the tank. I'm thinking it's not gonna happen for me this time. Maybe six months down the road when someone else does all the R&D on the DIY of a great LED hood for it.

Evil, I just checked out those lights at eBay. You think it would be worthy if one were able to retro the hood to house 4 of those?

Not to get anyones hopes up, but I got my hands on a Fluval edge a few weeks back and am coming up with a drop in retro for it.

Also, Meanwells are here tomorrow.

^^^awesome!

When were you going to tell me this?

Lol.

Rambo pee'd on one of his footballs, and on the way home a few weekends ago, the boss DEMANDED that we get him a new one. When at Petsmart, i saw one, so I figured i'd check it out.

I've been so depressed with the CHARGERS choke, that I forgot to mention it. Sorry honey!!!

evilc66 "Lucy!!! you got some splaining to do!!!"

That is great news! I was going to hold off on the LEDs until the spotlights got here but if a retro is a possibility in the near future I may just wait it out and make what I have work

sweet. also i have a rat terrier named rambo.

I've got an Edge running with two wide-angle MR16 LED bulbs that have a total of 6 Cree XR-E's (at least claimed to be Cree). The lighting is strong enough that the corals, even some SPS frags, are responding well in the center of the tank, but there's a gradual drop-off towards the edges due to the bulbs being in the center, as well as harsh shadows from from anything that sticks up too much. This thread has given me some thoughts about supplementing the lighting with some additional blue LED's to get more overall light, distribution to the edges, and especially a higher color temp than 5500K. I'm thinking about 5 blue LED's in a line without optics under the front of the canopy. I have a Coralife 10W 50/50 CF bulb shoved in there right now, so there's plenty of room for a line of LED's.

I was wondering though if I could wire a LuxDrive buckpuck directly into the original lighting? The wall wart for the original 20 watt of halogens outputs 12V, 1700 mA AC, and there are LuxDrive buckpucks that take AC input. I measured that the two MR16 bulbs are consuming only 7 watts at the wall wart, would it be correct to wire the buckpuck in parallel with the two MR16 bulbs to drive up to five more Cree XR-E's or equivalent? The wall wart supposedly should be able to handle another 13 watts.

Even with more light, I'm seeing a problem with shadows due to the center light placement. Unless the coral is under the opening, one side will always be in shadow, and some of the SPS with a thick base seem to be losing tissue on the sides that are always in shadow. And you can't really put anything too tall or large under the center, otherwise you can't get your hand into the tank to do maintenance.

Also getting light to the corners is a challenge. The LED's can't sit too close to the top surface; if the pump goes off for any reason, the water level rises quickly in the opening and submerges the LED's. Once you're 1/2" above the surface, any wide angle LED's already start being blocked from reaching the edges by the canopy itself. I've put some reflective tape on the inside walls of the canopy to try to reflect the light back in, though I'm not sure it helps.

That is good news...Been waiting to set up my Fluval edge for quite a while now, but was waiting for a drop in lighting solution to pop up so my softies would survive and possibly thrive. Ccjung, any time frame or specifics as to how much light coverage while keeping the stock look? Patiently waiting............... Ah B.S. No I'm not

Well my lights came in and I'm totally happy with them. The light spread is wider than I thought and I think it will help with the shadowing. I'm going to go with 4 CW Cree Q4s on a dimmable buckpuck and angle the outer ones slightly



BTW, this tank will probably end up being a mushroom/zoa garden. If/when nanotuners comes up with a drop in replacement I'll think about adding some SPS frags

Here's an alternative mr 11 that works nice for me and its cheap. It's not waterproof but you can fix that buy adding 2 coats of a good clearcoat. For 12 bucks free shipping with Prime you get:

160 lumens
6000k
140 deg pattern
2.1 watts consumption
30K hours

http://www.amazon.com/Brightest-LED-Angle-...4361&sr=8-1

Blue led's look great Hector! I'm still waiting to hear from Nanotuners about the possible drop-in led solution, but in the meantime I ordered 2 mr11 160 lumen smd led's from amazon for $25 with free shipping. I seen two other reefer's use these led's and the coverage is excellent in my opinion. I'll add a blue led strip soon after as well. I absolutely want to keep the stock look to this tank. So I will test frags from my Biocube 14 with the new led's and see how they respond. Now that I have the lighting sort of taken care of, I want to look at flow. I may get the zoo med 501 cannister filter and see if that will give good flow throughout the tank. I really don't want the look of a powerhead in there for asthetic reasons.

Psst, here's some options for a 470nm blue. I use the 4.7in flex strip myself, the angle is a lil too directional but what can you complain about given the cost?

http://www.oznium.com/led-flex-strips

http://www.oznium.com/smd-bar

http://www.oznium.com/silicone-encased-led-strip/tech

Thanks Smoke,
Both led options were taken from your post! How have the corals responded since the upgrade?

No corals yet other than what came on the rock. My setup is still curing/cycling atm. I did run the lights for a week and the output and color was very nice imo.

Hmm, if I could find my light meter... however they seem plenty bright going by my non-scientific meter. I've thought about hooking up another mr11 receptacle for even more light but may just throw a 3 way switch run the blues as moonlights off the power brick instead.

Oh btw, the fluval's power brick is good for 20 watts, not 10. The original halogens are 10 watts a piece, making the limit at least 20 watts.

From your pics, the new led's look 100 percent better as far as light coverage. I really don't see any spotlighting. I was going to do the same thing and order two new mr11 sockets and add them to the original light bar. I will wait and see how my corals react with the replacement led's first. I'm not going gung ho on this tank...looking for a simple setup that will keep everything healthy at a cheap cost.

I just noticed that as well. I wonder if we could just tap into the power supply in parallel and use it to drive a buckpuck and the LEDs

Probably. The brick outputs 1700mA max and these mr11 bulbs are only 125mA a piece. There seems to be a bit of headroom.



I was thinking about these bulbs, even though they have very good coverage they can't overcome the limits of the tank design itself.

The limitation of the tank means that if we put rocks that are high and to the sides, it will create shadows due to the point source location of the light bar.

Thus if you have your rocks not too high in the middle and lower at the sides, it will reduce the shadow and drop off.

Any updates?

Just to confirm what others were thinking here, I did tap into the 12V AC power in parallel successfully to drive more LED's. I had MR16's in the two sockets that were consuming 3 x 1.2 watt Cree XR-E's each, so only 7.2 watts total.

Since I'd previously opened up the lighting arm to retrofit MR16 sockets, I opened it up again and ran additional leads through the existing slots behind the MR16 sockets to the outside of the swing arm. Then I connected two $2 no-name buckpucks from Dealextreme designed for 8-40V input. These are rated only for 3V x 350 mA, but actually when tested can drive one LED at 660 mA, two in series at 500 mA, or three at 410 mA. (They can probably drive even more current at a higher voltage, but the Edge power supply only gives 12V AC.)

So I wired two royal blue LED's per buckpuck, or a total of four blue LED's to complement the existing six white ones. Total watts at the power supply is now 14W, still under the power supply's 20W capacity. I'm getting much purer colors and some nice flourescence on several of the corals. The only minor issue is that I'm using aluminum U-channel stock as my heatsink, mounted perpendicular to the swing arm instead of parallel as hector1520 drew it, and when the blue's are all pointing straight down, the center area at the top of my rocks is much more blue than white. But otherwise the rest of the tank looks great.

The U-channel is drawing a lot of the heat from the LED's, and I can feel it dissipating upwards through the holes in the top cover. I didn't add a fan but I think the stock cover being ventilated does allow the heat to escape.

got any pics? I had to put this project on standby for a bit until I get a new motor built for the Typhoon

As in GMC Typhoon?

so the two mr base led bulbs werent enough light? im thinking about possibly putting the bulbs together but probably wont if there isnt enough light

Yup, its now getting a Vortec block and reworked heads with a healthy dose of alcohol, the original motor finally went out after 158K

Nice. That's one of my all time favorite cars/trucks. I started doing a kind of tribute truck based on a 98 Blazer 2 door 4x4. Converted it to AWD and dropped an LS1 upfront with a 3"/4" drop. Never finished it though. Still sitting in the garage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq5MRnJmEmM

All you need is a little inspiration


BTW- that is an 11 second camaro he's racing

Very nice. Got the inspiration. Just don't have the time to dedicate to it anymore.

Are these the drivers you mentioned wwu123?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13553

Seems like they would would perfectly although the dimming capabilities would've come in handy. Still, the price for 4 Q5s and 2 of these drivers is the same price as one would pay for one buckpuck. I placed my order and will keep everyone tuned in once it gets here

that would fit into the space and power that the fluval has if im not mistaken, but there was also a 1*3w one that i never could figure out the maximum voltage for as the limits tend to be underadvertised in that sense.
if you run active cooling i dont see why you couldnt buy the bulb housing that would also heatsink the leds and drive them inside of that.
maybe just a crazy idea of mine.

Finally got the time to finish this thing. I ended up going with 4 XRE whites and 2 of the dealextreme mini pucks mounted on some angle alum. behind the swing arm. There is hardly any shadowing here as opposed to having it in front of the swing arm. I'm VERY happy with the color, its very ELOS-esque, like a crisp 14K. Now the only obstacle to figure out is cooling, It was impossible to get a case fan to fit under the stock hood, looks like I'm going to have to make a hood after all just to fit a fan, this is my first time working with crees, when you guys say they get hot, they get HOT!

Anyway, picture time



I added a small rocker switch to be able to turn the whites on/off






Blues on



Blue/Whites (this is a very old point n shoot, I had to set the exposure way down, the glare was horrible)



Much less shadowing than before




FTS

i would worry about the wires being exposed like that. they are pretty close to the water , and the output of the filter. just a thought.


nice setup otherwise, would like to do something like that with mine

All the solder joints got a nice thick coat of nail polish, I'll probably spray the whole thing with clear engine enamel to protect the aluminum as well. It'll still be a while before I fill it up so I have time to improve the design

So one of the mini-pucks melted this morning, I had the light's on with the fan just blowing over the hood when I noticed smoke coming out. Took everything apart, nothing shorted but one of the mini picks melted to the point one of the solder joints came loose. I tested the light's and they seem like they didn't burn out. That shows once again cheaper is more expensive in the long run.

This just pushes me to do it right and get a tried and true dimmable buckpuck. I can't seem to find the voltage draw from the buckpuck, I think I can still get away with piggy backing it off the stock power supply.

EPIC tank , i fell in love with the edge whe i saw it at petsmart one day. cant wait to see this all come together

Did you find a cooling solution yet?

^^^ THIS!