My latest LED Project...

I decided to try and light my 50g with only LED's.... so; with a spare $400.00 for the entire project -- LEDs, Lenses, Aluminium, Heat Sinks, Wires, Drivers, etc... I went to town with my drill press and solder iron and the end results is fantastic.

 

Both Blue & White LED's running...



The tank contains a good mixture of SPS, LPS, Soft corals and mushrooms, zoa's, etc...

I will let it go for about six months now and see how the health of the livestock fares. I like the look so much + the energy/heat savings is awesome. I hope that I can start a much more ambitious project and do a LED system on my large tank if this works as well as expected.

 

looks nice don't shock your corals

 

+1 on that....

Have the LED's on dimmable drivers, will gradually ramp up to full brightness over a few weeks.

 

Ill follow you on this one!! Really nice workmanship on that system! I'm really excited about LED's future use

 

Nice work, it looks really good.

I have a question about the heatsinks you used. It kind of looks like each "pod" is a sheet of aluminum with two heatsink/fan assemblies epoxied onto the back of it with the fans blowing down the heatsink fins. Is this correct?

If so, I'm just wondering if you might be able to get better cooling with the fans blowing directly on the back of the aluminum strips rather than using the two smaller heatsinks in between LED's. It seems like you could effectively cool the entire aluminum strips better this way rather than just the two spots the sinks are on. It might be worth an experiment to compare and see which one would have the cooler frontside. On the other hand, it is only 3 LEDs per strip so it's probably not too bad anyway.

Either way, great build - Which driver did you end up going with? Which Led's / Optic angles?

 

I tried using just fans on the Aluminum sheets and that did aid cooling, however the aluminum sheet still was very warm. That is why I opted to try a small "Chipset" heat sink fan between each set of LED's. This method of cooling was MUCH more effective! If I had to re-do the project I would design a long heat sink to run the entire length of each set of LED's and use a single fan per/heat sink.

Drivers used are 2 Mean Well ELN-60-48P's
12 Cool White Cree XP-G R5 LED’s (3w)
12 Royal Blue Cree XR-E LED’s (3w)
The Blue LED's are using 60 degree lenses and the White LED's are using 65 degree lenses.

 

Interesting, I would have guessed the opposite. I guess I'm underestimating the effectiveness of those little sinks. Glad you found the best way to keep them cool:thumb_up:

I'm using the same driver and Cree Royals. I like them a lot. What are you using as the 0-10V PWM source to dim?

 

good job! K++

 

Wow, that's a lot of fans. Those are CPU/Chipset fans. Just keep an eye one them. The cheap overseas ones use bushings, instead of ball bearings that will become very noisy & fail. Other than that, I do like what you did!