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Coral Vue Hydros

LED lighting over a pico


manni

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Hi I'm planning on creating a pico sized tank. Its gonna be quite small so I was wondering if luxeon led's would provide enough light for this as they are quite bright. There was a thread detailing a project involving luxeon led's by reefpirate but that thread went dead. I'm planning on having three luxeon white star led's and a royal blue one. Any advice would be appreciated

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First, how many gallons is your pico project. Then to measure brightness with #s, see how many lumens or mcd², your LEDs are. Another consideration is the thihnk about the viewing angle of the output from the LEDs. And finally, how do you plan on wiring these LEDs; Series or parrallel?

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erm not sure how many gallons, less than 1 i think, the tank is about the size of a cd jewel case. the foot print is about 5inches square.

 

the leds are the 1watt luxeon star 5500k type. each is supposed to give 25 lumens and there are three of these giving appoximately 75 lumens, plus a blue one peaking at 455nm.

 

the led viewing angle is 110 degrees i beleive so most of the ligth is thrown forward into the tank.

 

finally they will be wired in series.

 

what do u think?

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I have built 4 different Luxeon arrays : 24x1, 7x1, 3x1, 3x3. I currently have 7x1 over the little azoo tank which is around the size you are talking about. I can tell you that the 7x1watt LED setup is around (visually ) 2x brighter than the 7watt Azoo palm light that the kit comes with. Right now I am running a planted tank (FW)...if I was to do it SW, I would probably get the 700mA xitanium driver and put a 5 of the Star III's on it (4 white, 1 blue).

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oh yea gomer sorry i remembered reading that post somewhere but didnt know it was yours hehe, well im gonna give it a go on the sw tank. I probably wont be able to have more than soft corals or mushrooms coz im not gona have loads of luxeons over the tank, but then again it is a really small tank so maybe 3 luxeons will give out enough light, id really like xenia or gsp.

 

This tank is almost completely diy except for the actual tank itself. I've made my own tiny little power head and the lighting will be diy luxeon fitting. it's all gonna be powered from a 9 volt transformer. Only thing is in the uk i cant find a heater tiny enough to fit in the tank so one idea i had was to have a diy heatsink from the top of the lights feeding down into the water slightly so that the heat from the leds would be transferred to the water. Not much heat but better than nothing i guess.

 

the ph has been made from an old walkman motor, a 35mm film cannister, an impeller which i made myself and a various other pieces i salvaged from the walkman

 

hope it all works, if not i'll just convert it to a fw planted nano hehe

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