Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
140x30cm DIY LED light (115w), fresh water tank
1. 4x 10w LED chip, 6500K
2. 4x 10w LED chip, 10000K
3. 4x 10w LED chip, 7red+2blue(for plants, the color is pinkish like the bulbs for plant growth)
4. 12x heat sink with fan 55x55x12mm
5. 8x driver for 10w white LED
6. 2x step up buck converter for 10w “pink” LED
7. 3x automatic fan thermostat
8. red and black 3 amp wire
9. large sheet of 5mm black foamed pvc
10. sheet of 2mm acrylic
11. 3x 100w, 8.5amp power unit
12. other various bits and pieces
13. pvc round ventilation grates
The base for the whole contraption is just sheet of pvc with holes drilled where the leds are suppose to go. It needs a bit of planing and actually i build patchy prototype before this project, just to see how will the light spread in my tank.
Basically this step was mounting pre-assembled led+heat sink+driver units, and gluing drivers to the pvc with hot glue.
At this stage the thermostatic fan controller went in as well. I learnt from the prototype that those small fans don't have to go full blast to efectively cool the 10w led. They are noisy at full speed and few of them started to rattle after few weeks. The controller has probe which should be attached to one of the heat sinks. It will smoothly regulate fan speed accordingly to temperature.
The white 10w leds are straight forward when it comes to drivers. 1 driver per 1 10w chip all powered by 12v(volt). It's completely different story with those "pink" chips. They are still 10w but require 20-25v(volt). Step up buck converter is what i used to drive those. Small screw on this device allows u to rise 12v up to around 28v(gets very hot at this setting tho). After some testing and adjusting it turned out that 20v is whot i need(the bigger the voltage the stronger the light, at full blast the tank was completely pinkish).
That buck converter can relay up to 2amp of current and one will drive up to 4 of those "pink" led chips(it will get probably very hot tho). I used one per 2 leds
This photo shows everything fully wired, it's done the way that each row of leds has separate power cable and can be turned on separately. This is matter of preference and can be done differently if desired.
The rest is just the casing. 5mm pvc, glue, perspex and some idea how to enclose everything. One larger fan went on the casing to extract worm air from inside. There is 4 ventilation grates on top allowing air intake. The front is protected by 2mm acrylic but the whole light is not water proof.
Each row of leds is connected to 100w, 8.5amp 12v power unit. it's way to much but i left myself large margin for future experiments. It could be powered of 1x120w 12v power unit.
Now the big question.....des it work???
The light is working for over a month now.
There is visually a lot more light than it was in the tank before. The plants seems to be happier, especially cryptocoryne pontederifolia which produced a lot of offshoots. For the first time i'm able to grow cryptocoryne aponogetifolia which was totally melting on me all the time. Other plants in the tank are basic and will grow with any light.
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Great project. Did you work out how much all the bits cost for you to do this yourself? Are you willing to share that total?!
Did you buy all the bits from one place? Where?
Well done though.
You only missed one question, will you make one for me
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