Planning my 24" heat sink lighting

[trido]

Thanks Alex. The wiring wasn't as tough as I thought it was going to be. The hardest part of all, is proper care of the soldering gun tip to keep it working efficiently. Nothing a quick google search didn't fix. Fortunately, I have a huge tub of soldering flux for plumbing that was able to revive an already abused solder gun tip. Now I just need to remember to bring my drill home from work so I can move forward with this project.

I'll be putting some LED's over my fuge in due time. I'm tired of expensive bulb replacement costs every year.

 

[TJL]

Looks great Duane, should be an awesome light for your tank. You were not kidding when you told me that you starting on this build right away.

Cheers, Todd

 

[trido]

Here is the finished front side.
Im not real impressed with the cree optics mounting tape. IMO it really wont last more than a year. I ended up dabbing a tiny bit of E-6000 to two sides of each lens in order to keep them on the star.

 

[mojoreef]

Be real careful on the high noon Duane they can cook a coral in seconds when run at high power.


Mojo

 

[trido]

Thanks for the warning. I'm already rethinking the driver I have and will likely upgrade to a dimmable.
FWIW, these are just brigdelux 4500k whites. Not the cree XP-G high performance emitters.

 

[mojoreef]

Back a bunch of months ago when me and Guerry were designing/testing patterns and layouts we came up with a few conclusions. One was the dawn and dusk are nice but are for us only, no real effect on the coral (only a chance of negative) the slow ramp up falls into the same category. In the calculations it became very clear that no matter what combo of royal blues, blues and various types of white we incorporated we would have way more then enough par for growth, almost to much but being able to run the unit at a low % of power became a good result for that.

So that left us with coloring up corals, so we know that the pigments in the coral that gives us all the ewws and ahhs are brought out by exciting the pigments. Each pigment has a certain NM area that will excite and and bring it into play, so we directed our most of our attention to providing as many mini spikes in the different waves lengths as we could. So long story short we used two types of whites, blues, royal blues and a couple of greens to accomplish that (would have been nice to throw in a couple of UV's to is we could have found them at the time) the reds is also for a type of pigment but it really brought out the colors in the fish so we added a couple for that.

Anyway just thought I would throw that out their so you knew the method behind the madness for Guerry', mine and Eric and Becca's

good luck

Mojo

 

[trido]

Its been an exciting Friday night in Lynnwood. I built the fan mounts, hanging brackets and wired up the harness for the five strings and the fans.

Here is the top side minus the hanging bolts.

And all five sets of lights fired up.

Todd has extra green lights and is willing to part with two of them. They will be added to this fixture before I hang it.

 

[user 2204]

Very exciting Duane. Looking great and that fan mount is sweet! BTW, I like the use of the speaker wires. :lol:

Cheers,
Alex

 

[trido]

Very exciting Duane. Looking great and that fan mount is sweet! BTW, I like the use of the speaker wires. :lol:

Cheers,
Alex

Thanks Alex. Knowing that I wanted to hang this from the ceiling I pondered very hard on what kind of wiring to use. I figure that since the drivers run 22 gauge wires in and out and I used 22 gauge on the heat sink, an 18 awg speaker wire should handle the load just fine without heating up at all.
Suprisingly, Ive used up a 60 foot roll and need about another ten feet to finish the 4500K string of lights. Oh well, off to Lowes for more heat shrink tape and wood for the surround anyway.

 

[user 2204]

Sounds like your plan is working great. Say if you ever need anything like speaker wiring, cat 5, coaxial or the likes just ask. *lol* I have about 3000 ft of wiring just taking up space at the moment. *lol*

Cheers,
Alex

 

[tat2z_21]

Hey Alex, was wondering what your thoughts were on possibly running LED circuits with CAT5 or CAT6, I know that they are 22 or 24 gauge but should handle the low voltage and low current. The insulation should be able to hold the 1a of power. What are your thoughts

 

[trido]

CAT 5 or six would be great for a harness on pendant type fixtures like mine. It never crossed my mind. Probably would have been more cost effective too.

Anyway, Ive been busting my arse in the garage, office and every other room that I can make a mess in on a project like this.
I built a wood surround with vented plexiglass shield, and custom mounts to attach the heat sink to it, a cable hanging kit and I hiung it over the 29G. Of course the 29 wasnt in the right place so I had to drain it 80% with my big hose, drag it seven inches to the right, two inches forward, level it back up with several shims and refill it all within ten minutes. Now i'm breaking in a new to me eshopps PSK 75H.

Here are the pics of the finished fixture.

 

[user 2204]

Hey Alex, was wondering what your thoughts were on possibly running LED circuits with CAT5 or CAT6, I know that they are 22 or 24 gauge but should handle the low voltage and low current. The insulation should be able to hold the 1a of power. What are your thoughts

Yes you can do that without any issues. I would recommend using cat 5e plenum if you want extra insulation. Otherwise cat 5e would be just fine, no reason for cat 6, as cat 6 only allows more bandwidth than cat 5e. Network cables have been used to power low voltage systems for a long time. PoE or Power over Ethernet is used for many things such as CCV cameras, network routers, network switches, multi-line telephone systems and VoIP just to name a few.

For cat 5e the maximum amperage for each conductor or wire is .0577 Amperes. And there are a total of 8 conductors in each network cable. Just remember Ohm's law when figuring out any system and you'll be fine.

If anyone decides to use cat 5e for power what I'd recommend is using 4 wires for positive (+) and 4 wires for negative (-). I have personally made and used cat 5e wiring for home stereo speaker wiring, think Kimber Kable just cheaper. :lol: I will also be using cat 5e for powering my fans in my canopy and led fuge lighting.

Cheers,
Alex

 

[user 2204]

Very nice Duane. I like the look of the pendant and how you did the acrylic cover. LMK if you need any network cable, I've got a whole lot left fromthe whole house network wiring job here. :lol: Only thing is I only have blue soild core at the moment. I do have an awesome source for solid or stranded per foot for a good price.

Cheers,
Alex

 

[eww]

Hey Duane. Nice looking finished product. How do you like the look of the light in the tank so far? What power level are you running them at?

 

[TJL]

Very very nice Duane, turned out quite well my friend. I will have to stop by this week sometime to check it out in person.

Cheers, Todd

 

[trido]

Hey Duane. Nice looking finished product. How do you like the look of the light in the tank so far? What power level are you running them at?

The LED blue is quickly growing on me. I am real glad I made room for the extra dozen white though as the stock 12white/36blue kit ordered is way too blue for me and I'm a person who likes 14-20k tanks. Last night when I was playing around with my settings I found that I have four distinct lighting colors with the five sets. Im real happy so far and will definately be upgrading my fifth driver to a dimmable so I can get more white on an all day basis.

Right now I'm running the blues at 30% and the whites at 40%. The fixture is near 16 inches above the tank.

 

[trido]

Very very nice Duane, turned out quite well my friend. I will have to stop by this week sometime to check it out in person.

Cheers, Todd

Sounds good, I think I also need help with this new skimmer. Thanks for the compliment.

 

[eww]

Right now I'm running the blues at 30% and the whites at 40%. The fixture is near 16 inches above the tank.

Just be careful because if you are tuning your light percentages to what you think is a visual match to what you had pre-LED you could be burning things. From what I understand with LED's they put out a lot more PAR at a lower light level so your tank may appear dark to your eyes but it is actually getting equal to or more PAR than you had with MH/T5. For this reason we are actually starting ours at 10% power and working up from that. I don't expect to get much above 35-40% for a final light level. Once we get close to those levels I plan on testing this with a PAR meter to make sure it is in the range we want (500-600 at 12" water depth).

 

[trido]

Thanks for the warning and Im keeping areal close eye on all the corals. So far they are all real happy and my sunset mille is actually showing more polyp extension than yesterday so I'm not too worried about all the colonies, yet.
I mention the sunset mille because it was the only coral that retracted and bleached when I changed out two of my T-5's two months ago.
Shockingly, it was retracted and shriveled within a half hour after adding the two white/red spectrum bulbs. I was sure is was a gonner.