Ludnix's tropical 120!

I finished my LED lighting!

Here's a picture of the fixture. I attached 4x of the 23x4" heatsinks sold on RapidLED together using aluminum angle. I mounted all 84 LEDs using thermal adhesive and soldered them together based on their color. I'm using 42 Royal Blue and 42 Clear White leds for a 50/50 mix at 700ma. The optics are 80 degrees, the widest available on rapidLED. I then made bolting acrylic covers to protect the LEDs from water damage. They can be completely removed by unscrewing the nuts, or just cleaned from inside the canopy.


Here's a picture of it mounted in the canopy:


and a full tank shot with the new LEDs running.


I am very pleased with the result. It is difficult to photograph the LED colors accurately but it's plenty bright and I have no issues with spotlighting. I haven't plugged in a kill-a-watt, but I should be running just 210watts of electricity compared to the 700watts I had before!

I have more pictures to post soon, but I'm currently having some issues with my computer so I'll have to post them later.
 
Here's a picture of the back of the tank with the new LEDs:



Side view:


Bottlebrush acros:


Green Favid has been encrusting well.


Feather duster and ricordea, you can see the ricordea is ready to split.


Clownfish and their frogspawn nest. This is the coral where they regularly lay their eggs.


Incredible Hulk acro:


Montiporas:


I finally managed to get a good photo of the chromis.


Mushroom corals, the lighting is pretty direct now. It more like just having my metal halides on, whereas perviously the T5 flourescent lighting spread the light around more evenly (though not as naturally):
 
3 different pocillaporas:


Tricolor acropora:


Green/yellow pocillapora:


Since the LEDs have only been on for a day these photos should provide a good reference point for growth. I'll take some more photos next month so we can see how well they do under the LED lighting.
 
Awesome LED setup. One of the cleanest DIY's I have seen here. How far from the water are they? What did the cost of the entire LED array run you, if you don't mind my asking?
 
The LEDs are probably 12" off the water. The entire cost was $850 shipped from rapidLED.

I'm still having an issue with my monti-caps that I've had since the MH. The green with purple rim monti-cap and grape purple monti cannot stand something in my tanks water. My tri-color acro and ORA acros are looking fantastic and better since I added the LEDs, but I suspect there is still something wrong with my water. The montis were discolored for about 2 months now and I decided to take them out becuase they just didn't seem to be getting better. I moved them to the frag tank but it they didn't get any better.

Someone I had given a frag to of the purple rim a long time ago brought me a new frag and it ended up discoloring after a few days in my tank as well.

I tested my parameters and got the following results:

Calcium: 390ppm
Alkalinity: 7dkh
Magnesium: 1300ppm

I dosed to raise all those up slightly, so I'll have to post again with my new parameters. I have a 20g water change ready which I can do tomorrow.
 
I did a water change and changed out my kalkwasser. The open exposure to air allows the kalkwasser mix to form calcium carbonate. This isn't an issue, but I think I had a large layer of calcium carbonate in my top-off tank that I thought was calcium hydroxide when in reality I had none. The top off water's pH was lower than it should be for kalkwasser so it was clearly not fully saturated.

Hopefully this with the waterchange will help improve the corals. While I am still not certain what is bothering the montiporas, I have found the problem with the pocillaporas. While doing some late night spying with the flashlight I discovered my large algae cowrie is has a penchant for pocillaporas.

I threw him in my frag tank for now, I might just sell him to the LFS since I don't want to put any large animals in my sump and he'll eat the pocillaporas in my frag tank.
 
How come you have an open space between the two LED strips? Isn't that where mst of your corals are directly under?
led_light_fixture-800x600.jpg
 
I wouldn't necessarily say most of the SPS corals are in the exact center of the tank. I decided to make a gap between the two rows of heatsinks to more evenly distribute the light across the two feet. I really like a lot of sand dwelling corals so I wanted to be sure they would be getting enough light as well.

The light does seem to be distributed pretty well. The only places that are noticeably darker than my MH and T5 is directly under the rocks. The T5 fluorescents really bounce the light around where as the LEDs are more like the MH with a direct beam.
 
Using 6 LPC Meanwells, I'm using more LEDs per driver than is recommended by using 14 per driver instead of 12.
 
It's been a month since I've had the LEDs on. Here's the promised pictures of the first month's progress:










 
Here's some comparisons:

Last month:


This Month:


Last month:


This month:


There's been some definite growth, especially over the last week and a half. The corals seemed to acclimate to the new light pretty quick and are now doing great. Some of the acros are coloring up much better than I can capture with my camera.
 
SPS continues to do great, my caulestrea in the front got a little bleached, I'm not sure if it's from less light or more light with the new LEDs, but they returning to normal again now that I started feeding them.

I ended up getting a Vortech MP40w ecosmart pump at Reef-a-palooza for $350 which was a great deal. I'll snap some pictures of it soon to show how the tank looks now.

I did get some photos of my priolepis goby. This guy has been in my tank since the start, but I've only seen it about 4 times. It's very good at hiding.


 
I love it when you forget about stuff that is in your tank due to the fact that they are so well hidden.
 
That's an interesting little goby. I bet there were plenty of times when you wondered if it was still around.

What a deal on the Vortech!I presume you are keeping at least one of the Koralias?
 
Right now I'm trying no koralias. So far it's been working well, but I have them on hand if it isn't enough flow. I really love how wide the flow is on the vortech, I wish other pumps would make such wide even flow. The new Koralia evos that I was using were extremely direct, and I have too much SPS near the pumps to have that strong direct flow.
 
I went ahead and added fans to my LED heatsinks. They were hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold my hand on them for very long, so I decided I would err on the side of caution and put some fans on. I used some silent fans from xoxide.com, they are remarkably quiet and do the job just fine.

I have them all wired together and plugged into an 12v power supply that supports up to 2 amps. I placed one on each heat sink and now they are nice and chilly. Hopefully this will help extend the LED's lifespan.




I just have the fans blowing straight down into the heat sink and are attached with a little packing tape. I want them to be easily removable if needed.
 
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