Diy led build

[lighthouze08]

very cool.... i plan on investing in a reef keeper very soon so that makes even more sense now... is there an adjustment on the drivers themselves or do i need a separate controller? and how are u liking the strength with the amount of LEDs u went with? im thinking between 60 - 70 for myself but id like not to go way over board if i dont have to

if you are planning to use the reefkeeper for dimming, you need to get the reefkeeper advanced lighting control module, basically all your dimming lines from the drivers go in there and you can program the reefkeeper to ramp up/down the light, dawn/dusk effect ect. If you're planning on dimming it manually, get the potentiometers. As for the driver, you use it to adjust the current going into the leds once when you set it up initially and that's it, for example i run my blue at 700ma and white at 1000ma, that you need to adjust it from the driver initially. 60-70 leds are way more than enough for the 75 gallon. I'm running mine at about 40% at the moment

 

[4adam12]

Just out of curiosity, how did you determine how many leds you needed? Was it just based on what you had for a fixture or figured by tank size?

 

[lighthouze08]

I wanted to run 5 drivers total on 2 fixtures and each can run 14 leds so i maxed them out. I wasnt worried about too much light bc i can always dim them. Plus ill upgrade to a bigger tank in the future and will reuse the same fixture. You cant have too much light lol

 

[4adam12]

I was wondering because my tank is 75x30x30 so how do you figure how many you need? Is there a "x" watts per gallon or surface area type of thing?

 

[lighthouze08]

I dont think theres x number of watts er gallon applies to led. The radion fixture has 46 leds per fixture i believe so i tried to match close to that number.

 

[underwaterfirefighter]

Man that looks great! I would really like to see your set up in person sometime if that would be ok. I have a 120 that I want to set up soon and the last thing I need for it is the lighting. I'm also in Botetourt about 10 minutes from ua.

 

[underwaterfirefighter]

And great thread/documentation btw!

 

[lighthouze08]

not a problem, send me a PM