Mountains of sawdust (360g plywood, LED, Arduino build)

Got the parts to fix the drivers and LEDs are finally 100% operational and ready to go live.

All on:

IMG_5005.jpg


Whites 100%, blues off:

IMG_5010.jpg


Whites at 50%, blues 100%:

IMG_5009.jpg


Whites off, blues 100%:

IMG_5011.jpg


The photos all look fairly accurate in terms of color, except the blues only photo, which doesn't look nearly as blue as in real life. But at least this shows how powerful those whites are - even when they are at 50% they stand up well to the blues...

Please excuse the pile of random crap in front of the tank, I was too eager to get it running and take pics to clean anything up. :D
 
I tried to take a photo of the fixture up in the hood but given the sheer size and the angle I'd need to be at to get the whole thing in the camera's field of view it was just really awkward.

Back a page or two I posted one of the arrays with LEDs glued on. That was the biggest array, there are two a bit smaller, and one smaller than that. I screwed a 2x4 at each end of the tank into the framing at the top of the hood to basically form a pair of rails. Then I ran a 2x2 from rail to rail for each array. These beams are loose and can be slid forwards and backwards on the rails. Each array is bolted to it's beam with a bolt that protrudes out of the beam about 4" which basically acts like a really loose pivot so I can tilt the fixtures about 4" in any direction.

If you go back many pages, before the teardown, I posted an MS pain sketch of where I planned on placing the fixtures with respect to the rockwork. That is basically the plan I ended up using.

On top of all that, there are two way smaller arrays for accent lighting (three cool white rebels, three plain blue rebels, and six royal blue XR-E) and moonlighting (three no-name white LEDs). These are leftover LEDs I have from various experiments and are run at way lower currents so I'm not really worrying about output or efficiency.
 
Yay Wille!! Looks really nice. Are you really going to put water in there and fish and stuff getting poop and algae everywhere??

Going bare bottom or ?
 
kcress said:
Yay Wille!! Looks really nice. Are you really going to put water in there and fish and stuff getting poop and algae everywhere??
Click to expand...

Geh! Stop feeding my OCD!

Going bare bottom or ?
Click to expand...

I am a huge fan of certain creatures that require a substrate, i.e. my pistol shrimp, so I'm not a fan of totally barebottom tanks. I am planning on the same arrangement as I had as before - semi-barebottom. I have maybe 150 lbs of coarse aragonite sand that I'm going to pile in the middle of the tank, so it sorta fades off to barebottom near the edges. I did this before and it worked really well. It de-emphasizes the fact that this is a square box and gives it a more natural look with a ragged sandy edge.

I was a little worried that the sand would just spread out evenly over time but it really didn't move at all in the few months the tank was running, and if it leveled out on a longer timeframe than that I wouldn't mind taking a few minutes to tidy it up. I may also try to cultivate coral on part of the barebottom at some point...
 
Finally! Welcome back :).

Is it me, or is the hood bigger than the tank? :D

Did you start making water yet? That 360G of water will shire take a while to make.
 
terahz said:
Is it me, or is the hood bigger than the tank? :D

Did you start making water yet? That 360G of water will shire take a while to make.
Click to expand...

You are correct, the hood is bigger. But it's not as large a difference as it looks, since the viewing panel doesn't reveal the entire height of the tank - it's only showing 18" out of the 24" of height. The stand is as tall as the tank and hood put together so the photos above don't give a good sense of the overall scale. Once I've moved the pile of junk out from in front of the tank I'll take more pictures. (Please don't tell my guitar and bass that I just called them "junk!")

Haven't started making water yet but I have 60g in storage in the basement water change station. It'll take 5 or 6 days beyond putting that in the system to make enough to fill it up. And then pretty much an entire day to heat it up to temp and get the salt mixed in. So yeah, I definitely have to plan ahead... :D I am starting to work out an actual go-live plan in my head and I'm pretty much gonna need to be busy almost every day from now until my target of having it online and stable by the frag trade on the 18th of next month.
 
Yup. :D Notably, the "livestock" you can see in the tank the photos includes a bunch of heatsinks in an antistatic bag, a bunch of LED optics in a priority mail box, and a plastic bag full of plumbing parts. :D This livestock is rather low maintenance. I don't even have to feed it!

If you look at the cloth panels above the tank, you can see that some of the white LEDs are visible through the cloth, but none of the blue LEDs are. I probably sound like a broken record here, but these XM-L LEDs are freaking intense! And I'm only running them at ~2.4A.
 
I have them on the heatsinks you gave me. On most of the heatsinks there are just two of them per heatsink. On some of the heatsinks there are two of the XM-L and either one, two, or three XP-E.

In all cases, the heatsink gets only moderately warm. It's definitely warmer next to the LED but nowhere near painful, you could comfortably touch it all day. There are two fans blowing air into the hood but they're tiny PC fans in a gigantic hood and the airflow is not directed specifically at the LEDs. The fans are blowing directly over the drivers, which in hindsight is probably not strictly required thanks to careful tuning and component selection, but they also provide a slow turnover of air in the hood which will hopefully mitigate any humidity issues.

I do plan on putting a temp sensor directly behind one of the LEDs at some point but more out of interest than any concern for the thermal performance of the fixture.
 
I am very impressed with your project. Congrats on finding a solution when it sounded like you were gonna have a new hamster cage. This gives me some inspiration to keep up a positive attitude on my own tank. I really like the idea of creating interest by obscuring parts of the tank. I met a guy once who introduced me to that same concept. He was putting a 180 behind an install hole originally built for a 120. His rationalization was that it's much more natural for fish to swim by your viewing pane and not just turn around.
 
Looks like there will be a big buyer at ABC's frag swap, that means the rest of us need to get there early.

I'm enjoying your DIY builds immensely
 
Stu, I am attending for sure! I don't exactly have the deep pockets of some other local reefers so I doubt I will be the biggest buyer but I will have my eyes open for large corals. I'm having a bit of a dilemma as, traditionally, I've tried to stock most of my tanks with captive-propagated frags that I can allow to grow out, but it would be really crazy to try to stock a tank this large from frags, so I am going to be looking for a few larger pieces to fill in some space.

One remaining obstacle: I am not totally happy with the rock I have available right now. I traded away some of the rock that was in it last time it was running, and I made a bunch more this fall to replace it. But it's not fully cured yet and probably won't be in time for my projected go-live. That basically leaves me with a less-desirable situation where I will probably be getting the tank running with minimal rock, then going back in a month or two later to add the rest of the rock. It'll be a challenge to re-scape the tank if there's already a lot of livestock in it. Which left me considering running the temporary 60g I have up now for the next few months and leaving some of the livestock in there, but that would be awkward too, as I don't really have enough of certain types of equipment to run both at once (i.e. ATO, heaters, etc.)

And of course I've been cruising the LFSs and online shops for livestock for a few weeks. As a refresher, after a few unfortunate deaths around the time of the transfer and a trade or two to with some local folks I have the following:

-1 shrimp goby, unconfirmed species, with pistol shrimp (the female of the pair went carpet surfing)
-A pair of translucent cave gobies
-A single PJ cardinal
-Pair of barberi clowns

I have the following up for consideration. This is a very brainstormy list, definitely nothing close to a final choice in stock:

-group of chalk bass
-group of anthias (I know I said "no" to anthias earlier in the thread, but I've become enamored with them after seeing a few in local tanks recently)
-group of "reef safe" butterflies (i.e. Schooling Bannerfish, Heniochus diphreutes)
-one or two tangs. Or maybe a rabbitfish, but I'm still nervous about the potential for them to eat corals

Now that I've had the current livestock for a year, I can say I'm happy with all of it. And I'm really enjoying having multiples of the same species in a few cases, so I am going to try to continue that pattern where appropriate.
 
I love having multiples of species, it makes for a much more interesting and natural looking tank! A few thoughts about your planned fish list, though:

Heniochus diphreutes: I was completely enamored with these fish when I first set up my 120. I still love them, but the only problem is that it is really hard to tell them apart from the NOT reef safe variety (Heniochus acuminatus?) and they can get quite large. In your tank I dont think size would be a problem, and they would look really cool. As far as reef safe butterflies go, did you also consider Pyramid butterfly's?

Chalk Bass: These little guys are highly underrated. I had three, they did school with eachother, and they were very colorful with interesting faces and behaviors. That being said, after being in captivity for two years with eachother they got kinda big and ornery. I think I had a female and two males, so the males started fighting. Eventually one of the males was chased out of the tank and landed on the floor, severely damaging one of his eyes. Even though we saved him the female eventually jumped to her death as well and the two males never associated with each other again.

As always, your experience may vary, your tank is completely sealed up top, and your tank is also much larger then mine. I just wanted to give you some of my own personal experiences and tell you that I do think your fish list is very unique (a good thing!) and awesome.

Can't wait to see the tank with water in it!
 
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