Well, I have been running my leds for a few months now and have been a little embarrassed at how it looks because I am not done making it pleasing to the eye because I havent had the time or tools, I plan on putting bamboo boards along the edges that way all you see 2 bamboo boxes hanging down from a rack. Anyways here are some pictures of my kit still in progress, I hope you enjoy.
Here is a picture of the front of the entire lighting set-up
Picture of the whole LED kit, and let me remind you before I get comments about how ugly it looks, it is in fact not finished, I need to get thinner acordian tubing to put wires in, get attachements for the wires to hook up to the back of the heatsink to make them hidden, I need to put a bamboo box around the Heatsinks to hide it and make it look kickass, and then I will be done but untill my brother gets done with the nail gun it will have to wait.
Here is a Pic of the underside of the heatsinks with every light on the tank
A pic of the box I had to make to hold all of the drivers
Picture of the top of the Led's, before I put these fans on I wanted to see how hot the heatsinks actually got without them for just 2 mins or more of run time and it burns you it gets so hot, so let me just say this, these fans make it so cool I can lay my hand on it for an infinite amount of time and it will continue to feel cool to the touch.
As a comparison between the 3 types of lighting excluding power compact bulbs here is what I was looking at
Picture of my tank when I started out with T-5 little growth, low power cost, decently priced bulbs.
Picture of my tank with MH, good growth, High power cost, expensive bulbs.
Picture of my tank with LEDS now, High Growth, really low power cost, cheap bulbs.
My kit leans more towards the red spectrum as seen in the comparisons and gives me phenomenal growth compared to the other types of bulbs and will last me an extremely long time and is cheaper to run and replace damaged bulbs.
My Leds are 36 Royal Blue, 24 cool blue and 12 warm whites. This is the equivalence to about 7watts per gallon if you were to use the old MH ratio to Watts/Gallon method. But instead of having to run 840watts of MH bulbs I run 216 watts of leds being each led uses 3watts of power at 100% capacity which I run mine at around 90% power.
With my controller I can switch between each set of leds seperatley, or put it on 3 different light cycles. I use a timer to run these 9 hours a day from 3-12pm.
As for the actual build I used as clear of Lexan glass as I could get to cover the heatsink so that unwanted splashing could not reck my leds and would not harm par rating, we drilled holes in the heatsink to hook onto the rack with hooks and it worked out perfectly as for the rack we used it is just regular shelfing units you can find almost anywhere and holds my drivers in a box perfectly as well as any other materials I want above the tank.
The pieces to come are replacing the accordian tubing with thinner pieces and making the bamboo plates to cover the heatsinks edges so it looks professionally done and securing any connections and improving on wires etc.
Dumbderks LED's
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