Cuog's Adopted Pico

[cuog]

Got some new rock from reefcleaners, put in a piece, also took a couple smaller pieces out of my ten gallon

 

I still have one more piece that will go in after I build my light, it has some coral on it that will need light.

[Mr. Microscope]

Wow. I just read your whole thread. Cool progress. I like all the DIY. How are you getting the water to loop around from the filter to the fuge and back again? Is there a solid wall between the impeller end and output?

[cuog]

Yeah, it was a pretty slow loop, since moving up to the 10gal I didn't have the space where that tank is to run the sump so I sealed the back for later. When the water came in from the impeller it would collect on that side, then go out the tube as well as overflow out of the area since gravity wasn't too much on my side. And it then cycled back into the larger side where filter bags would normally go then overflow back into the tank. It was an interesting setup I hope to revisit later. Because of the very low flow in the sump/fuge area all of the waste produced in my tank would fall out of suspension there. I plan to try this again with a much larger clean up crew there to continue breaking down all the food particles.

 

On a DIY note my white LEDs came in today so I will be building the light for the new tank in the next couple days.

[cuog]

After a few days and a lot of soldering I have a light setup. I don't know how permanent it will be as it was a test in cheap lighting(I used about $2 worth of LEDs plus some random bits I had laying around already.

 

Top:

 

FTS:

 

In its home:

 

At the moment I am mostly concerned over the heat, I have a little shy of an amp running through those little solder leads which get hot enough to burn your skin, I'll be keeping an eye on it before I leave it running with me not around to make sure it doesn't start a fire. There are a total of 48 "ultra bright" LEDs with around 3.5 watts, I don't know the lumens but I'd definitely call it less than 50(it doesn't touch my 120 lumen flashlight, which isn't too surprising since its a 7 watt LED lamp)

 

If this light turns out to not work I'll probably pick up a couple crees and try that.

[c_k_kuehne]

That light looks bright.

 

I only have 16 "Ultra Bright" white LEDs (8,000 mcd each) and 11 "Bright" blues above the Pico Lamp. Only going for softies but my lighting looks good to the eye. We'll see how well it works once I come back from vacation asa I'm bringing back a few more frags of various types.

[cuog]

I really wanted to go as bright as possible, I'm not sure what I'm putting in there coral wise yet, but I'm thinking I may try SPS or maybe the really tiny carpet anemones, but for now I'll be putting a frag of GSP in to see if I can grow anything after I'm confident the LEDs are safe.

[cuog]

Looks like that light wont work :/ I ran it a couple hours today and it got hot enough to melt the solder on the top, once that happened the resistors just started burning out as they were taking too much current.

 

I may give the light one more go this time with a less extreme number of bulbs since I still have some laying around might as well use them. If it isn't bright enough I'll just use it to grow chaeto elsewhere.

 

Now I need to decide to step up to CREE LEDs or if I just want to take the easy way out and pick up a simple coralife 50/50 bulb and call it a day.

[cuog]

Ok last attempt on the light

 

Its a little more patchy blue and white than my first light, but its a lot cooler. First off there's only 6 white lights and 10 blue, with 3 UV bulbs just because, Then I changed the resistor layout so that they are further away from each other to better dissipate heat. Again I'll be letting it go for a while before I call fail/success.

[c_k_kuehne]

When I did mine I used a LED Series/Parallel Wizard to help me figure out how to run a bunch of LED's in Series and Parallel at the same time. It show me how to match them up and what resistors to use. Worked great and runs cool as can be.

 

I found the Wizard at superbrightleds.com

 

Thought that might help.

[cuog]

The calculator is great in theory but I'm trying to recycle parts as I don't want to commit too much money to this lighting idea. The first time I had 48 resistors(one for each LED) which seemed like it would work just fine, however resistors dissipate energy as heat, so I had a total of 8watts of heat dissipation in a 2.5 by half inch strip. With the reduced LEDs The resistors are only dissipating 2.5watts in a similar area so the heat generated overall is far less.