LED Biocube 32 - Large Retro Plus M Install

[Smoke Inator]

Received my light from Dave yesterday....arrived much faster than expected....Thanks Dave!

I watched Dave's video install on a BC 29 but, the 32 is a bit different.

The largest problem is that there isn't any place to mount things, only a few standoff's

 

Parts Needed

Got way more than i needed from HD, Lowes and Radio Shack.

In the end, i only needed 2 screws and nuts, sheet metal, super glue, zip ties and some standoff's. The standoff's from Radio Shack

 

Remove all the original guts but keep the fan and the controller board.

10 screws for the cover

2 screws to remove the LED board

Power is connected to the board and is removed easily. two screws hold the wires in and a zip tie holds the cable in near the grommet.

 

Testing placement and compare size of new vs old. figured i would mount centered from the original.

 

Since there is no reflector or standoffs in the light area that are close, i had to create a bracket. Simply cut the aluminum sheet metal 6" by 3 1/2" (make two of them) and then transfer the mounting hols from the original LED fixture. 1 is for a screw and the other larger one just holds the bracket in place.

 

Attach the heat sink to the brackets with the two screws and nuts.

 

Used 5 standoff's 4 for the driver board and one for the bluefish. Its easier to add the standoff to the boards and then figure where to place them. Place the driver board first. Simply apply superglue the place and hold till its attached. Rinse and repeat for the bluefish. I opted for 1 because the 2nd looked like it would touch metal parts and cause interference.

 

Everything in place and glued in, added a few zip ties to clean it up a bit

 

Finished

 

I took the afternoon to do everything slowly but, total time was less than 45 minutes.

 

Easy and I love the controller.

 

Now i need to figure out what channel is what and if i can attach a fan to the driver board. I left the original fan in place and it will reach the boards. The original board without power needs to be kept in place...The clock still works with the backup battery.

 

Its zero illum in Fiji so I'm sol for testing the dedicated moon light

 

Thanks,

Ron

[Smoke Inator]

Adding a morning pic...going to be fun playing with this today

[Smoke Inator]

The Bluefish controller has some cool settings where it uses another locations sun, lunar and weather data.

 

I have clouds passing during the day and the thunderstorm test was really cool.
The midday settings are the most important, they can control the morning and evening settings on a bell curve basically running at 85% is plenty for this tank and SPS but will test PAR when i find a meter to borrow.

 

The dedicated moonlight is channel 5 and controlled separately and uses the lunar data so setting at 5% you can have nights with no moon!

 

6 channels to control - I figured out that #6 is for the fan

 

All settings graphed out

 

Early Evening ramp down

 

 

 

[DaveFason]

Thank you for this!

[HarryPotter]

Awesome! Does the stock controller do anything anymore? Or did you just keep it for aesthetics?

[Smoke Inator]

Awesome! Does the stock controller do anything anymore? Or did you just keep it for aesthetics?

stock controller turns into a clock...if removed there is a hole that looks out of place

[jcolletteiii]

I'll be putting one of the large retro kits into my 16 'LED' biocube. I'm not sure how the stock LED's keep anything alive, but Corallife should be ashamed saying you can keep even low light corals under these LED's. In any case, I decided on the large kit because I have rock up high middle-ish in my tank and don't want lots of shadows and hotspots. Also, if I migrate to a larger tank down the road, I can use the larger light over that. I'll have to keep it cranked down pretty low over the 16, but I can't wait. The color temp of the stock LED's is also nowhere near blue enough for my tastes. Can't wait to have total control over the color spectrum!

 

How are you (and your corals) liking the new light so far?

[jcolletteiii]

Here's what the large kit looks like being shoehorned into the Coralife 16g. Biocube -> http://www.nano-reef.com/topic/378549-jcolletteiiis-minimalist-hanging-16g-biocube-journal/?p=5451025

[mapgirl4army]

I too have the retrofit in my 32 gallon Biocube and love it, but the settings on my Bluefish app look different from yours. Hmmm.  I just relabeled the channels based upon your post, but now I'm wondering if the colors on the controller bars are an actual representation of the led light color for that channel or not.  

[DaveFason]

On 12/31/2016 at 10:27 AM, Smoke Inator said:

stock controller turns into a clock...if removed there is a hole that looks out of place

Curious any updates on the tank? 

 

-Dave