DIY LED LIGHTS GUIDE.
Hello everyone, im putting together a small guide on how to build your on lED lights, since there is not much info here about it.
WHY LED LIGHT
Led can produce more PAR (Photosynthetic Active Radiation) per watt than MH or T5 and thatâs what we really want to get your corals to grow, another advantage is that they are low consumption so your hydro bill will be less expensive, they also produce less heat so you wont be needing a chiller and they really get the color of your corals out, so here we have few advantage when using LED.
WHAT DO WE NEED FOR OUR LED LIGHT.
-We need 3 Watts LED lights
-An LED driver
-A power supply
-A heatsink
-And a fan or more, depending on the size of the array
WICH LED.
Cree are the most powerful Ledâs on the market so far, you can also use Rebel ledâs and I have use the 10 Watts Chinese from ebay they do the job but better stick with Cree, there is a couple of suppliers that I like:
Ledsupply and rapidled
They have pretty much everything you will need, the only bad news here is that the heatsink coming from US will be expensive on chipping and I havenât found where to buy them here in Canada yet.
LED DRIVER.
some of them are dimmable others are not, the dimmable ones can be PWS which need a frequency to be dimmed 0Hz for 0% and 1kHz for 100%, others can be dimmed by difference of voltage on the dimmable pin 0v for 0% up yo 10V for 100%
POWER SUPPLY.
Most of the dimmers need a power supply to run and others have the power supply integrated, some will go to 35V or 36V others will go all the way to 48V and on a big variety of amperes, from 150 ma to 1300 ma
HEATSINK.
The led get hot so thatâs why we use a heatsink to dissipate the heat and a fan to help it, if you can not find a heatsink you can use a tick aluminum sheet.
SOME INPORTANT INFO.
The most important colors are Royal Blue and Cool white; the blue is the one that really helps with the photosynthesis, the royal blue also help bring out the color of the coralâs.
Red help some corals but be careful it also promote the grout of algae so you have to be carefully when using it, make sure you use a diffuser with the red and put it in between cool whites to mix better the red. You can also use a warm white that has red on it and it will mix better with white.
Some people like to use RGB (red, green and blue) in this case is important to know that the green does nothing for the coralâs but it looks nice to the eyes
Some people have stopped using the RGB all together and are using UV instead, so thatâs up to you. The UV will help bring the color of the coral out.
For tanks 12â high you donât need to use optics
For 24â you need optics
SOME NUMBERS:
An array of ledâs with 60 degree optics can give you and equivalent of 150 W MH light
And a 40 degree optic will give you the equivalent of 250 W MH
Also an array of 10 led can give you 500PAR at 12â depth
And 200PAR at 24â depth. And thatâs why opticâs are important to help bring the PAR up at a more depth
HOW TO MAKE AN ARRAY:
Example of an array of 11x3 ledâs
W RB W RB
RB W RB
W RB W RB
Separate them from one another by 2â and 3â from one array to the next
W -2â- RB -2â- W
3â
W - 2â- RB
3â
W -2â- RB -2â- W
And you can keep them 4 1/2â from the edge of the glass all around your tank.
Another way is to put them all at 2â from one another; this is more typical on deeper tanks
This are just examples, you can get them closer if it is for a 24â depth tank, what its important is that you need to cover the bottom of the tank with light and you want to make sure you donât have any spot lights.
If you only have an array of lets say 6 led 3x2 led you can do it this way:
W B W
B W B
MOON LIGHT.
Ledsuply have some very inexpensive and nice moon light led.
The idea of the moon light is to make it nice to look at, at night and here you will want to see some spot lights, you want to see the light flickering at the bottom of the tank with the water movement or at least thatâs my preference at the end of the day is what you like the best.
I hope this guide is useful to you guys, I have done some lights and I spent a lot of time researching to make my first one, also all the numbers that I gave you are from some other folks that have the equipment to do it, and those are the numbers that more people go by.
