Led driver selection help

[royalbijoy]

Hello reefers,
I am planning on an upgrade to my 3 year old reef with mixed corals...
To cut short the story, I want to ditch my T5HOs and get them replaced with LEDs. I did some study on LED lighting and finally came up with the leds which I prefer to buy. I am struggling to find the right driver(Meanwell LDD) for them and so requesting experts to please help me with it. The idea is to have four clusters(10 led each) covering a 30(length) x 24(depth) x 24(height) inch tank. The clusters are supposed to avoid any disco effect. Will be using 80 degree lenses to focus the lights into the tank. Kindly let me know the LDD driver type for each of these leds. Since there are 40 leds(10x4), expecting 4 dimmable Meanwell LDD drivers. Kindly advise if you spot anything different in here.


LEDs used in a cluster:-
LED| Qty| Wavelength|
----------------------- ---- -----------------
SemiLEDs Violet UV LED| 1| 410-420
Exotic Hyper Violet LED 2| 425-430
Philips Luxeon ES Neutral WHITE 3 Watt LED| 3| 440-455, 500-630
CREE XT-E Royal Blue LED| 2| 450-465
CREE XP-E Blue 3W LED| 1| 465-485
Philips Luxeon Rebel ES 660nm Deep Red LED| 1| 650-670

 

[royalbijoy]

Did some more study and seems like Philips Luxeon ES Neutral WHITE 3 Watt LED and CREE XT-E Royal Blue LED alone have to be in LDD-1000HW. Others can be on LDD-700HW. Is that correct?

 

[pwreef]

Too much white. What power supply are you planning to use? 1000 is fine for the white and RB, 700 for rest is okay. You want to control each channel separately. So it will be:
12 violet - driver 1
12 white - driver 2
8 RB - driver 3
4 blue - driver 4
4 red - driver 5
With that plan you need 48V power supply. I recommend HLG-320H-48A good luck!

 

[royalbijoy]

Thanks..... What do you recommend instead? Replace with royal blue? Or hyper violet?
Can I use arduino to control the ldd drivers ?

 

[mrbnx]

I don't dim my Violets, but I also only run them when they won't compete for par. That might save a little in the driver department and let you splurge on dimmable for the rest.

With pwreef's layout, it's still a 1:1 ratio basically, which is way too much white. Even a 2:1 can look too white/yellow and 100%.
my current layout is 12RB: 10B: 12UV: 6Cyan: 10CW: 6NW: 4WW.
I run my whites at no more than 60% otherwise, to me at least, it's pushing 10K or lower. I'm going to redo mine soon and add at least another 12-16RB.

 

[royalbijoy]

Since I am upgrading from t5s, the bluish look is a turn down for me. I prefer the more natural color for corals.. Not a big fan of floroscence......
@mrbnx, the dimmable and non dimmable ldd drivers Dont make much difference in price and so would go for dimmable for future upgrade..... Do you think I should use 2 cool white and 3 royal blues? Instead of the 3 neutral white and 2 rb I mentioned earlier?

 

[royalbijoy]

Another 2 quick questions
1- How do I select the power supply for my LDD drivers?
@pwreef, you said HLG-320H-48A.... How do I decide which one to go for? Depending on the number of leds on a string, which is going to be max 12, looks like 12 x 3.2 = 38.4v . Then, 3.5v for controller and another 3.5v for driver drop, would total to 38.4 + 7 = 45.4. So as you mentioned the 48v power supply would be perfect. Regarding power, I think all I need is 40 * 3 = 120 watts. So is it worth spending the extra bucks on 320w power supply, or can I go for a lower rated one? Any suggestions for me? But I agree it makes sense in buying a higher rated powers supply for future upgrades, but for now I am on a tight budget and wife is not so happy about it....
So my requirement would be
Voltage = 48v
Watts = 150watts +
Pins = 5 pins for 5 drivers
Sorry for asking a dumb question, but can I go for a computer SMPS kind of power supply instead? The meanwell ones cost 100$+ and I would rather spend the money on leds than the power supply.. Any low cost alternative for the power supply?


2 - Do you recommend using lenses and what angle is recommended? The height(vertical) of tank is 20 inches and depth is 24 inches, by the way. I have read some people recommending lenses for white and RB leds and none for all other colors...


I appreciate the help...

 

[royalbijoy]

By the way, this is the old tank which will be replaced soon....

 

[pwreef]

You can use any other power supply. You can get one from e-bay for $30-40. The one I recommended it best because it does not have a fan, is sealed and barely gets warm to the touch because its very efficient. If you are not planning to dim your fixture I would be very cautious. Many people burned their corals like that. You can dim LDDs with Arduino or many pre-made controllers now available. Lenses will increase PAR and visual brightness ~2x depending on angle. Personally I am a fan of properly made clusters. I would either use Radion clusters or reefll clusters and make my fixture from that. Anything you cluster yourself will not be as close, so you will have disco effect. If you have a wife and a reef tank, you should have a tank budget every month, that you are free to spend as you wish, or you might loose both. good luck!

 

[moncapitane]

I like the drivers which steves leds sells. You might check those out. They are significally cheaper than the lld ones and they work with PWM out of the box.

 

[pwreef]

LDD-1000H is $5. You can run 1-15 LEDs on it with a 48V power supply. Steves drivers you HAVE to match the voltage, or you will be burning off excess voltage with heat. These are very inefficient drivers. The only drivers better than LDD are reefll but they cost more.

 

[royalbijoy]

Reading more is confusing...!!!!!

I read some advancedaquarist papers for deciding the led colors. But then had a look at Ecotech Radion units and they tend to have different colors from what I chose. To my surprise, they even had green leds... In my knowledge, green does not contribute to coral growth and white leds already have a lot of green spectrum in it. So why add more green, when you can use that power to deliver more coral friendly wavelengths......
This is what Ecotech has in their new leds; Do you think following a leader in the industry is better or going with technical papers is good??????

• Cool White: 8 Cree XP-G2 (40W)
• Deep Blue: 8 Osram Oslon Square (40W )
• Blue: 8 Cree XP-E (24W)
• Green: 4 Cree XP-E (14W)
• Hyper Red: 4 Osram Oslon SSL (12W)
• Yellow: 2 Osram Oslon SSL (6W)
• Indigo: 4 SemiLEDs (10W)
• UV: 4 SemiLEDs (10W)

The technical paper I referred to was targeting the entire wavelength from 410-480nm + 680nm. That's why I chose my leds to have the entire band. Yellow, Indigo, Green were not included in my design. Can anyone help me to decide whether I should go with them or not?
By the way, my existing color combination per cluster of 10 LEDs is:

LED | Quantity | wavelength
SemiLEDs Violet UV LED |1| 410-420nm
Exotic Hyper Violet LED |2| 425-430nm
Philips Luxeon ES Cool WHITE 3 Watt LED |2| 440-455, 500-630nm
CREE XT-E Royal Blue LED |3| 450-465nm
CREE XP-E Blue 3W LED |1| 465-485nm
Philips Luxeon Rebel ES 660nm Deep Red LED |1| 650-670nm

 

[perkint]

Green is for two reasons. One is it can help with colour rendition so helps the colours of your corals pop. The other reason is so they can slap another line on the marketing tat about 'more full spectrum' or some such rubbish...

Tim

 

[formula409]

Go for efficacy mate Id be trying to knock off a cluster like the Reeflll premade fixtures lights

they make a heatsink pcb cluster like this

And it comprises of these

Luxeon M (T) have some pretty crazy efficacy upwards of 120lm/w

the Lime and PC amber are the way to go to fill the spectrum, they have broad peaks really fills in the colour gaps and makes up for some of the famous gas discharge peaks

Anyway If I were you Luxeon M as much as possible, your power bill will thank you and fill the gaps with little rebels! dont get tempted to use luxeon UVs if you go this way too god damn small!

 

[royalbijoy]

How many of those reefll fixtures would be required for a 30(length) x 20(height) x 24(depth) tank ?

Another question, can I go for 24 inch height with these LED fixtures? I would love to go tall but not sure if PAR would be high enough at bottom.....If not reefll, I would be going for the DIY cree setup as I had mentioned earlier... How much PAR can I expect with 40 3w CREE and Philips leds, with 90degree lenses..?

Finally I still don't like the fact that reefll has turqoise, lime and amber in the lights... Those wavelengths are already in abundant in white leds.....Check the spectrum of Cree white below...

Even red is debatable....Only used by shallow water corals... Not sure if I got any........ If not, then adding red would be waste of power. I could even put a Warm White so that I get both 450nm and the red spectrum in a single led.... The hyper red we get is 640nm, which is as good as adding yellow or any other non usefull wavelength. According to the graph we need 680nm RED which is not available. So why bother about red... just pp in a warm white and it should take care of all non useful part of the spectrum....
Below is the spectrum usage by zooxanthalle....

 

[pwreef]

If you are interested in only coral growth you don't need any of these colors. Not even white. Royal blue and violet is all that is needed pretty much. If you want your tank to look good then you need all these colors and be able to control them individually.

 

[royalbijoy]

So do you say adding those green , amber and turquoise is better than adding a Cree Warm white, in the viewing aspect?

 

[perkint]

It would give you more control over the final colour, which does have a massive impact on your viewing pleasure, even if not so much impact on growth. But adding warm white is an acceptable (and fairly common) way of upping the CRI.

Tim

 

[pwreef]

What controller are you planning to use?

 

[ghellin]

Ditch the disco lights and go with high binning, Hi CRI rated neutral or warm whites. Why use a crap white and then try to supplement with red, green, amber, yellow, lime, etc. Unless each individual color is on it's own specific dimmable channel it just looks weird. now if you have a 10 channel light sure I bet you could dial in a decent color, but then we get to tackle blending and coverage.