00Warpig00
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My Aquastyle Bridgelux 72 LED --> Hamilton Technology T5VHO fixture retrofit DIY
After months of hesitation I pulled the trigger and ordered my 72 LED Aquastyle custom kit. I had to, my T5 bulbs were way past end of life and I didn't want to sink $100 into new bulbs when I could use that money to get me part of the way to a workable LED fixture for my 180.
My current T5 fixture, A 72" Hamilton Technology 4 bulb two ballast fixture with odd size ~53" T5VHO 80 watt bulbs that are only available from Hamilton and run ~$200 shipped. IMO it didn't make sense to go through the BS and $200 a year for bulbs. I changed the location of the T5 bulb mounts in the fixture the last time I changed bulbs and set up the fixture to use 4 48" T5HO bulbs that I could get locally for ~$100. Turns out the 80 watt VHO ballasts were too strong for those bulbs and I would burn through a set of four bulbs in about 8 months.
Heat in the tank when I dropped from the 4 x 80 watt bulbs to the 4 x ~50 watt bulbs went down a bit but I still had my fixture sitting directly on top of my glass tops on my 180 and even with the 200 watt total vs the 320 watt setup my tank still sat around 82* on a good day and on occasion would creep up to 85* even with an industrial blower blowing on my sump water 24/7 It was becoming a problem and I was having to cool the tank with 2 liter blocks of frozen RO/DI top off in my sump. I was looking at a chiller and after seeing prices on chillers decided I needed to find a better way. All this potential money I was looking at spending made LED's a no brainer.
I started pricing LED fixtures online and at the LFS and most of them were VERY expensive. I have an electronics background and I KNEW for a fact that there was HUGE markup on these LED fixtures that were commercially available. So I started researching building my own and figured my Hamilton Technology fixture would be a decent donor for a fixture as opposed to heat sinks and all that other stuff. I admit the heat sink idea looks uber hi tech and I'm a nerd at heart so that really looked cool but I wanted to try to retro fit into my Hamilton fixture and keep costs to a minimum. plus I already have the Hamilton fixture and if it didnt work out I could order the uber cool hi techy heat sink stuff later to fix any unseen potential problems that may arise.
I struggled for a LONG time on pulling the trigger and ordering my LED kit due mostly to lack of driver options. I decided if I was going to spend the money I wanted certain things and would not compromise on those things. One of my major goals was to have my LED fixture dimmable to 0 light output and to not have a harsh shut off at lights out every night that endlessly sends my fish darting for cover when the sun falls out of the sky at night. With this in mind I also wanted to simulate a sunrise/sunset to my LED lighting and incorporate moonlighting. I was having issues finding drivers that would meet these needs, run 72 LED's AND not exceed the wiring limitations of my Hamilton fixture. I still have not settled on my final drivers. I am leaning toward inventronics drivers later and a Reef Keeper Elite or a DIM4 light controller. I just could not hammer out which drivers I needed. It became clear that I needed to get something going soon or I never would or I would at a minimum be forced to sink another $100 into T5 bulbs because mine were going to fail any day. So I pulled the trigger and ordered a 72 LED kit from Aquastyle with the basic "Maxwellen" drivers figuring I could sell those on ebay for a few bucks later as well as my pulled ballasts from my Hamilton fixture. Give myself a little time to figure out the puzzle. So the following is going to be my first phase of my LED retrofit. I will work out the dimming and final config later.
Here is my Hamilton Technology fixture before I have done anything except remove all the glass bits.
Then I removed the reflector. The Hamilton fixture is pretty well made.
I removed all of the T5 bulb mounts and opened the Ballast box and removed the ballasts. Below are the T5 Ballasts.
Then I removed the T5 ballasts to make room to mount the LED drivers.
I mounted the Maxwellen drivers to the steel ballast box of the Hamilton rig using self drilling/tapping sheet metal screws.
This is where the wiring harness of the Hamilton fixture imposes a couple limits on the max number of drivers you can use. The wiring harness has only 9 wires in it and one is a ground to ground the fixture casing to the ballast box casing, and to the ground receptacle on the wall outlet. Not willing to go the dangerous route and drop the ground connection and open up the use of the 9th wire I was limited to eight total wires to transport LED drive current to the fixture from the driver box. I decided to try an experiment and wired my LED drivers in a common ground where the two "Blue" strings would share a single ground wire back to the box. likewise the "White" string would do the same. This left me with three wires used per color or driver 1+ driver 2+ and driver 1/2- as well as driver 3+ driver 4+ and driver 3/4- this left me with two empty wires in the harness to use for moon lighting or future expansion with LED drivers. I wired the drivers in the box in this fashion and tied up the spare two wires for now.
Next I hit the local Lowes and picked up four strips of 1 1/2" x 6 foot aluminum strips to glue my LED stars to. I measured the fixture reflector and cut down the length then centered the aluminum strips in the reflector and used self drilling/tapping sheet metal screws to screw the aluminum strips to the reflector giving me 4 strips of basic aluminum heat sink to glue my stars to.
Now it was time to figure out how I wanted my LED's laid out on the strips. My LED kit from Aquastyle was ordered with the intention of running 19 LED's on my two "Blue" strings 16 royal Blues and 3 True Violets for a total of 32 Royal Blues and 6 True violets.
I laid them all out loose making only a few measurements. My goal was to have two True Violet stars above the center of each of the three openings in the top of the 180 and to have one red star above each cross member to split the tank in thirds. I was planning to hang the fixture above the tank when finished and didn't want too much red but wanted to give it a try even though this is all for a FOWLR tank. I have fish with red in them and would like to get their colors to show well too but was concerned too much red might cause algae issues. The results of the algae concerns remain to be seen. I can easily eliminate the reds from the circuit later if needed. I then wanted even coverage of Royal Blue and the 10000K Whites with a bit of extra concentration in the middle of each tank third.
I forgot to take pictures while I was laying out and gluing my LED's to the aluminum strips. I was really into figuring out how they should be laid out to meet my desires. So sorry for lack of pre wired pics. I laid them all out where I wanted them, by hand, doing almost no measuring other than where the center of each third would fall when the fixture was mounted. I literally eyeballed the rest. I set out to glue them all to the aluminum. After gluing them all down which took a couple hours to do by hand and keep it looking nice and straight. I heated up the Weller iron busted out the roll of Kester .031 solder and started soldering them all up and very quickly realized the "Heat Sink Plaster" glue that was included with the kit that claimed to set up in 10 minutes was grossly incorrect. I had a few LED's float on me while trying to solder them even two hours after gluing them. I was starting to screw up the placements so I decided since I had put in about 6 hours work already and if I kept going thing would start to go South. So I broke for the night to let the glue harden. Besides it was 2am and I had been working on the project slowly and deliberately since 8pm. I was beat!
So the next morning I picked up where I had left off and started wiring all the LED's. This is where soldering experience and a good soldering iron and some good solder are essential to making this quick non aggravating work. A quality iron and solder are worth the price in frustration savings alone much less the speed at which you can solder these up when experienced at soldering. Anyone who has soldered professionally will agree. So I heated up the Weller temp controlled base station set her for about 775* busted out the .031 again and started cutting stripping and pre-tinning my lengths of wire. About an hour and a half later I had all the Strings soldered up in their strings how I wanted them.
If you look closely you will see that I have two LED's, one each on the second and third strips that are not wired. These are there to become my moonlights and I will address this issue later. Still need to decide my final plan for the moonlights.
Here is a picture of all the LED's lit up after a little bit of trouble shooting. I had one wired LED not light up on the entire fixture. My first thought was a bad LED. But I dropped 3 volts across the LED where it was soldered to the star and it lit right up. That's when I realized I glued one of my stars on backwards and the one star was wired in reverse polarity. Oops! The glue was hardened and luckily the way the star was positioned I could use the pads next to the ones I was connected to in order to correct my polarity issue on that one star. Four quick hits with the Weller and the problem was rectified (pun intended). Instead of drawing a diagram with my color layout I just decided to light it up and take a few pics. here is the layout. It's fairly easy to tell where the different colors are.
All that was left was to re-assemble and hang the fixture above the tank. Another trip to Lowes to get a few feet of chain and a couple molly bolts. I also connected the potentiometers to the drivers. I used two pots and wired two drivers to each pot. the "White" string drivers to one pot and the "Blue" string drivers to another pot. I have the Whites and Reds on the "White" strings and the Blues and Violets on the "Blue" strings. I tested the "Maxwellen" drivers for use with a 0-10V controller system by applying first 1.5V and then 3V in both polarities across the dimmer wires of the Maxwellen drivers. In one polarity the LED's all turn completely off. in the other polarity the driver goes into a "lightning" effect where every second or so the LED's flash to 100% for a couple milliseconds and then back off. It really did look like lightning flashes. Pretty cool but confirms that the Maxwellen driver do NOT work with 0-10V control. I have not tried PWM so cannot confirm this. Also I noticed that the Blue string looks like a GREAT moonlight when the dim wires of the Maxwellen drivers are left to float with infinite resistance. This could be exploited to use a maxwellen driver as a moonlight driver with a string of blues by leaving the driver powered on at night but with the dim wires switched to an open or floating state. It really looked great for moonlight with my 32 RB's and 6 True Violets on. Or you could even keep one string lit in this manner for an even more dim moonlight solution without needing separate moonlights.
Here are a few pics of some of my fish under the new lights.
Finally a youtube link to the finished product hung above my 180. note I could not figure out the white balance issue with my camcorder. The video is MUCH more purple and dark than standing in front of the tank. The tank has a very nice actinic look to it. It looks very similar to a 50/50 10000K/Actinic split. Maybe a tiny bit more purple. I am VERY happy with the color and the shimmer is spectacular. Also totally satisfied with the light intensity for a FOWLR tank. You would need more for a coral tank.
I also just realized I don"t really have any stills of the whole tank with the fixture hanging above it. The fixture is mounted 9" above the water line. I will take some pics tomorrow and post them here.
http://www.youtube.com/v/LbVNA6VSVWM
All in so far I am into this project for a total of $291
Nick
After months of hesitation I pulled the trigger and ordered my 72 LED Aquastyle custom kit. I had to, my T5 bulbs were way past end of life and I didn't want to sink $100 into new bulbs when I could use that money to get me part of the way to a workable LED fixture for my 180.
My current T5 fixture, A 72" Hamilton Technology 4 bulb two ballast fixture with odd size ~53" T5VHO 80 watt bulbs that are only available from Hamilton and run ~$200 shipped. IMO it didn't make sense to go through the BS and $200 a year for bulbs. I changed the location of the T5 bulb mounts in the fixture the last time I changed bulbs and set up the fixture to use 4 48" T5HO bulbs that I could get locally for ~$100. Turns out the 80 watt VHO ballasts were too strong for those bulbs and I would burn through a set of four bulbs in about 8 months.
Heat in the tank when I dropped from the 4 x 80 watt bulbs to the 4 x ~50 watt bulbs went down a bit but I still had my fixture sitting directly on top of my glass tops on my 180 and even with the 200 watt total vs the 320 watt setup my tank still sat around 82* on a good day and on occasion would creep up to 85* even with an industrial blower blowing on my sump water 24/7 It was becoming a problem and I was having to cool the tank with 2 liter blocks of frozen RO/DI top off in my sump. I was looking at a chiller and after seeing prices on chillers decided I needed to find a better way. All this potential money I was looking at spending made LED's a no brainer.
I started pricing LED fixtures online and at the LFS and most of them were VERY expensive. I have an electronics background and I KNEW for a fact that there was HUGE markup on these LED fixtures that were commercially available. So I started researching building my own and figured my Hamilton Technology fixture would be a decent donor for a fixture as opposed to heat sinks and all that other stuff. I admit the heat sink idea looks uber hi tech and I'm a nerd at heart so that really looked cool but I wanted to try to retro fit into my Hamilton fixture and keep costs to a minimum. plus I already have the Hamilton fixture and if it didnt work out I could order the uber cool hi techy heat sink stuff later to fix any unseen potential problems that may arise.
I struggled for a LONG time on pulling the trigger and ordering my LED kit due mostly to lack of driver options. I decided if I was going to spend the money I wanted certain things and would not compromise on those things. One of my major goals was to have my LED fixture dimmable to 0 light output and to not have a harsh shut off at lights out every night that endlessly sends my fish darting for cover when the sun falls out of the sky at night. With this in mind I also wanted to simulate a sunrise/sunset to my LED lighting and incorporate moonlighting. I was having issues finding drivers that would meet these needs, run 72 LED's AND not exceed the wiring limitations of my Hamilton fixture. I still have not settled on my final drivers. I am leaning toward inventronics drivers later and a Reef Keeper Elite or a DIM4 light controller. I just could not hammer out which drivers I needed. It became clear that I needed to get something going soon or I never would or I would at a minimum be forced to sink another $100 into T5 bulbs because mine were going to fail any day. So I pulled the trigger and ordered a 72 LED kit from Aquastyle with the basic "Maxwellen" drivers figuring I could sell those on ebay for a few bucks later as well as my pulled ballasts from my Hamilton fixture. Give myself a little time to figure out the puzzle. So the following is going to be my first phase of my LED retrofit. I will work out the dimming and final config later.
Here is my Hamilton Technology fixture before I have done anything except remove all the glass bits.
Then I removed the reflector. The Hamilton fixture is pretty well made.
I removed all of the T5 bulb mounts and opened the Ballast box and removed the ballasts. Below are the T5 Ballasts.
Then I removed the T5 ballasts to make room to mount the LED drivers.
I mounted the Maxwellen drivers to the steel ballast box of the Hamilton rig using self drilling/tapping sheet metal screws.
This is where the wiring harness of the Hamilton fixture imposes a couple limits on the max number of drivers you can use. The wiring harness has only 9 wires in it and one is a ground to ground the fixture casing to the ballast box casing, and to the ground receptacle on the wall outlet. Not willing to go the dangerous route and drop the ground connection and open up the use of the 9th wire I was limited to eight total wires to transport LED drive current to the fixture from the driver box. I decided to try an experiment and wired my LED drivers in a common ground where the two "Blue" strings would share a single ground wire back to the box. likewise the "White" string would do the same. This left me with three wires used per color or driver 1+ driver 2+ and driver 1/2- as well as driver 3+ driver 4+ and driver 3/4- this left me with two empty wires in the harness to use for moon lighting or future expansion with LED drivers. I wired the drivers in the box in this fashion and tied up the spare two wires for now.
Next I hit the local Lowes and picked up four strips of 1 1/2" x 6 foot aluminum strips to glue my LED stars to. I measured the fixture reflector and cut down the length then centered the aluminum strips in the reflector and used self drilling/tapping sheet metal screws to screw the aluminum strips to the reflector giving me 4 strips of basic aluminum heat sink to glue my stars to.
Now it was time to figure out how I wanted my LED's laid out on the strips. My LED kit from Aquastyle was ordered with the intention of running 19 LED's on my two "Blue" strings 16 royal Blues and 3 True Violets for a total of 32 Royal Blues and 6 True violets.
I laid them all out loose making only a few measurements. My goal was to have two True Violet stars above the center of each of the three openings in the top of the 180 and to have one red star above each cross member to split the tank in thirds. I was planning to hang the fixture above the tank when finished and didn't want too much red but wanted to give it a try even though this is all for a FOWLR tank. I have fish with red in them and would like to get their colors to show well too but was concerned too much red might cause algae issues. The results of the algae concerns remain to be seen. I can easily eliminate the reds from the circuit later if needed. I then wanted even coverage of Royal Blue and the 10000K Whites with a bit of extra concentration in the middle of each tank third.
I forgot to take pictures while I was laying out and gluing my LED's to the aluminum strips. I was really into figuring out how they should be laid out to meet my desires. So sorry for lack of pre wired pics. I laid them all out where I wanted them, by hand, doing almost no measuring other than where the center of each third would fall when the fixture was mounted. I literally eyeballed the rest. I set out to glue them all to the aluminum. After gluing them all down which took a couple hours to do by hand and keep it looking nice and straight. I heated up the Weller iron busted out the roll of Kester .031 solder and started soldering them all up and very quickly realized the "Heat Sink Plaster" glue that was included with the kit that claimed to set up in 10 minutes was grossly incorrect. I had a few LED's float on me while trying to solder them even two hours after gluing them. I was starting to screw up the placements so I decided since I had put in about 6 hours work already and if I kept going thing would start to go South. So I broke for the night to let the glue harden. Besides it was 2am and I had been working on the project slowly and deliberately since 8pm. I was beat!
So the next morning I picked up where I had left off and started wiring all the LED's. This is where soldering experience and a good soldering iron and some good solder are essential to making this quick non aggravating work. A quality iron and solder are worth the price in frustration savings alone much less the speed at which you can solder these up when experienced at soldering. Anyone who has soldered professionally will agree. So I heated up the Weller temp controlled base station set her for about 775* busted out the .031 again and started cutting stripping and pre-tinning my lengths of wire. About an hour and a half later I had all the Strings soldered up in their strings how I wanted them.
If you look closely you will see that I have two LED's, one each on the second and third strips that are not wired. These are there to become my moonlights and I will address this issue later. Still need to decide my final plan for the moonlights.
Here is a picture of all the LED's lit up after a little bit of trouble shooting. I had one wired LED not light up on the entire fixture. My first thought was a bad LED. But I dropped 3 volts across the LED where it was soldered to the star and it lit right up. That's when I realized I glued one of my stars on backwards and the one star was wired in reverse polarity. Oops! The glue was hardened and luckily the way the star was positioned I could use the pads next to the ones I was connected to in order to correct my polarity issue on that one star. Four quick hits with the Weller and the problem was rectified (pun intended). Instead of drawing a diagram with my color layout I just decided to light it up and take a few pics. here is the layout. It's fairly easy to tell where the different colors are.
All that was left was to re-assemble and hang the fixture above the tank. Another trip to Lowes to get a few feet of chain and a couple molly bolts. I also connected the potentiometers to the drivers. I used two pots and wired two drivers to each pot. the "White" string drivers to one pot and the "Blue" string drivers to another pot. I have the Whites and Reds on the "White" strings and the Blues and Violets on the "Blue" strings. I tested the "Maxwellen" drivers for use with a 0-10V controller system by applying first 1.5V and then 3V in both polarities across the dimmer wires of the Maxwellen drivers. In one polarity the LED's all turn completely off. in the other polarity the driver goes into a "lightning" effect where every second or so the LED's flash to 100% for a couple milliseconds and then back off. It really did look like lightning flashes. Pretty cool but confirms that the Maxwellen driver do NOT work with 0-10V control. I have not tried PWM so cannot confirm this. Also I noticed that the Blue string looks like a GREAT moonlight when the dim wires of the Maxwellen drivers are left to float with infinite resistance. This could be exploited to use a maxwellen driver as a moonlight driver with a string of blues by leaving the driver powered on at night but with the dim wires switched to an open or floating state. It really looked great for moonlight with my 32 RB's and 6 True Violets on. Or you could even keep one string lit in this manner for an even more dim moonlight solution without needing separate moonlights.
Here are a few pics of some of my fish under the new lights.
Finally a youtube link to the finished product hung above my 180. note I could not figure out the white balance issue with my camcorder. The video is MUCH more purple and dark than standing in front of the tank. The tank has a very nice actinic look to it. It looks very similar to a 50/50 10000K/Actinic split. Maybe a tiny bit more purple. I am VERY happy with the color and the shimmer is spectacular. Also totally satisfied with the light intensity for a FOWLR tank. You would need more for a coral tank.
I also just realized I don"t really have any stills of the whole tank with the fixture hanging above it. The fixture is mounted 9" above the water line. I will take some pics tomorrow and post them here.
http://www.youtube.com/v/LbVNA6VSVWM
All in so far I am into this project for a total of $291
Nick
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