My mod-heavy biocube downgrade.

[crank2211]

Long story short - I had some equipment failures, heatwave issues and a pinch of neglect that turned my 55 gallon into a disaster. Instead of abandoning all hope the girlfriend convinced me to downgrade. Here's my story so far:

Started with the stand:

First mod to the BioCube was cutting the tab between chambers 1 & 2 for better flow. I never used the stock pump and instead used a spare MJ1200.

Next I bought the In-Tank media chamber package. Fuge area - media holder - Fish Save - Water Director. I'm not using the fish saver currently. I feel like it cuts off a lot of air to the main display tank from the vents in the back of the hood. I found some $3 polyfill at the fabric store and also got some Purigen and Chemipure Elite since that's what In-Tank recommends. I've never tried them but we'll see what happens. I also picked up the submersible led light from them and plan on getting some chaeto for the fuge area.

Next step was to figure out how I was going to dose the tank. I wanted to keep everything clean looking and very functional. I found my solution at Lowe's. I had some spare Drew's Dosers laying around. Brand new actually. Decided to put them to good use with my controller. I drilled a couple holes in the back of the hood and siliconed in some 1/4" elbows. Bent some tubing down and I've got my drip feed dosing solution.

This drips Cal and Alk into chamber 3 (Return Chamber) hourly. The doses are separated by 5 minutes and each one runs for 70 seconds putting in roughly 1.3mL of supplements. I'm still messing with dose amounts and testing.. Works really well and easy to disconnect the hoses when I need to take the hood off. Quick disconnect for easy hood removal is really important to the build.

This was the state of the tank a couple days ago:

Then out of nowhere the Actinic ballast craps out leaving me with only the daylight PC bulb (10K I think?). No good.

 

[crank2211]

I planned on retrofitting LED's anyway. This just gave me more motivation to get it done sooner. I had some spare Cree Royal Blue's and the ELN-60-48P driver that I was using on my old SunPower for supplemental blue. This is what the SunPower strips looked like:

I salvaged 10 of the Cree's and received this in the mail the other day:

Decided to go with StevesLeds.com heatsink and try out the Luxeon diodes since I was there. I was surprised to see the price so low on these things. I picked up (6)4000K, (6)5000K, (9) Royal Blue. One of the 4k's was DOA. I ended up using only (4) 4000k and (4) 5000K on my build. The rest a mix of the Luxeon Royal Blues and my older Cree's. I really like the open tube aluminum heatsink they use. It's a lot lighter than the block/fin setup and should be more effective at cooling. The pressurizing cooling fan they provide is very quiet and puts out some serious air through the open tubes.

I thought I ordered some adhesive thermal compound for the build. I didn't. I really wanted to avoid drilling a ton of holes but with what I had on hand, couldn't avoid it. I ended up riveting in all my led's. Not ideal but it works. Unfortunately I only have 2 drivers. Since I'm only using 8 white bulbs - I had to share the string with some royal blues as well. Also not ideal but it works. Here is everything riveted in:

Wired Up:

I did a poor job of pre-planning the diode layout. Not the sequence of white/blues but rather the direction of the terminals. A couple places I had to route wires in a funky way, making the job a bit more difficult than it had to be but everything turned out really well. I riveted in the fan and mounted the regulator jammy onto the heatsink as well.

Here's the progression of the inside of my hood:

Gutted

As you can see I decided to keep the stock moonlights. They work well enough, the wiring is already there and I don't have to think how to mount different ones. Plus they're paid for already - Even better.

It's hard to tell in the picture but I ended up wiring both LED string and the heatsink fan into the original lighting power cord built into the hood. This is ideal because outside of the hood, the power cord can easily be disconnected from its mating half. The second cord wasn't needed so it was pulled out.

 

[crank2211]

I then put together the second half of the cord. I cut the connector piece off from the blown out ballast and wired in the 12V Wall-Wart adapter for the heatsink fan and both drivers for the LED's. I kept everything together with some wire braid. The cord can be disconnected and moved around in one piece really easily:

The site wants you to cut a 2x2 square piece of the hood out for the heatsink fan. I opted to just extend the stock air grooves in the hood to feed the fan with fresh air:

The LED build took way longer than I anticipated. Lots of soldering - lots of riveting. The end result was worth it I think. I'm still playing with dim% on both strings to see what I like. I tuned both drivers to 875 mAh and running 20% dim on white string and 30% on blue for now to help acclimate. There still seems to be plenty of light in the tank even dimmed so low. I'm also really happy with color I got.

I'm thinking about going more softy in this tank. Lots of zoas/palys/rics. Possibly some mushrooms. I might do an SPS or two if I find something at a deal that I really like. Plus I want to see what these LED's can do.

 

[Patricklong]

This is almost EXACTLY what I plan on doing to a BC. Very clean LED install. Debating on whether I want to take on that huge soldering project since my skills with the iron are not THAT great.

Thanks for the picture steps!

 

[Pallobi]

Very awesome little build!

 

[crank2211]

This is almost EXACTLY what I plan on doing to a BC. Very clean LED install. Debating on whether I want to take on that huge soldering project since my skills with the iron are not THAT great.

Thanks for the picture steps!

Yeah, the LED's aren't too bad, actually. My soldering skills are still very amateur at best but once you get the first couple done it becomes much easier. I will say it's a lot easier if you pre-tin the wire and the pad connectors. Then just a little heat and they melt together in a second. Just don't do what I did and use rivets. The heads are pretty big. I found out today that there were some unplanned electrical connections somewhere between the solder,rivets and heatsink. My LED's would fire up but only partially. For instance the actinics driver had power but only half the string was lit while half the white string was lit. It was a PITA to start grinding down rivet heads and resoldering away from them to get it working properly. If you do use a metal faster of some sort - also use a nylon washer under it. Worth it in the long run.

very cool heatsink/fan!

Thanks, yea I really dig it. The fan is actually pretty quiet. I wouldn't say whisper quiet like the site says but it puts out some serious air and should keep the open tubes really cool. The air slits on top of the hood might be adding unnecessary sound too. It might have been quieter if I just cut a big hole in the hood. When I tested it on the bench it seemed a lot quieter...

 

[crank2211]

Hood Fan!

Hood Fan!

Decided to start looking at how I was going to mount the fans to the hood. The door on the back of the hood was out of the question. It was much to small to fit them. The center of the hood has the lights/splashguard. That left me one option - the front feeding door. After eyeballing them initially, I didn't think I could fit both of the fans on the door. They might have fit but I don't think I would have been able to open the feeding door all the way so it stayed open on it's own. The way the hinge is setup I had to push the fans far to the front. It looked to be a really tight fit and the curvature of the front glass had me thinking I couldn't squeeze both of them in there initially. I decided to play it safe and go with just one fan. It might have worked with 2 but I didn't want risk tearing up the hood to find out. Oh well, now I have spare incase the salt water tears the one I mounted up.

Steps:

Cut the front lip of the feeding door:

Figure out how far you can possibly push the fan forward without hitting. Here you can see I drilled 2 sets of holes. I realized I could squeeze more room out up front allowing me to open the door further before hitting the filter guard. Once you have the location set drill out the shape of the fan. It doesn't need to be perfect - just close. Lightly sand the rough edges.

pro-tip. Hold the fan on the underside of the hood as close to the lip as possible. Use your drill to make the holes from the inside out. I didn't do that the first time and the holes were slightly off because of the convex shape of the hood. I was close enough the first time though that the holes are covered up by the filter guard. Crisis averted.

Mount the screws through the filter holder first, then the hood, finally the fan. Here's how I routed the wires. Most of the connections/voltage adjuster are made in dry safety of the splash guard. I drilled small holes for my zipties and ground down small divots for the wire to easily enter under the splash guard. I used the original hole in the back of the hood where the stock cord went through and I ended up taking out because I didn't need. The connector just barely fits out of it. Again, I'm able to quickly diconnect the hood fan from behind the hood for when I need to take it off for maintenance. Glorious.

All finished up:

With a bit of pre-planning this mod is extremely easy to do. Like with most DIY, a drill and dremel go a long way. The fan is extremely quiet. I set the adjustment knob to ~80%. It might be the quietest piece of equipment on my tank. Even more so than my heater.

More to come..

 

[Patricklong]

Looks like that fan was meant to go there.

Are you considering some sort of water protection for those LEDs?? Acrylic plate maybe??

 

[crank2211]

Next Up:

Bearing replacement for the MP10ES. The dryside is too loud for my liking:

Custom bracket for mounting the float switches for the Reef Angel. I'm not quite sure how/where they're going yet. I'm thinking of making something that will hang into chamber 3 and maybe hooking up an aqualifter to another 1/4" elbow for quick disconnect.

 

[crank2211]

Looks like that fan was meant to go there.

Are you considering some sort of water protection for those LEDs?? Acrylic plate maybe??

I agree. I really like the way it turned out. So far I've been able to maintain the integrity of the stock look of the tank. Simple and clean and most of all, functional. Being able to remove the hood easily is the most important part to me for some reason.

The LED's and fan are tucked nicely in the stock acrylic splash guard. You can see it better here:

The fan is working pretty well. I've been running it for about an hour now. It dropped the temp a degree. For a while there it was fighting with the heater - I forgot to turn it off while testing. I think it could do a degree and a half in an hour. Maybe more. Will test more in the coming days:

 

[elinder]

looks very nice, I just did this the other day with the Steve's LED and my biocube.. Sure wish I would have seen this first. I would have kept my moonlights.

 

[crank2211]

looks very nice, I just did this the other day with the Steve's LED and my biocube.. Sure wish I would have seen this first. I would have kept my moonlights.

Bummer man. Did you throw them away or save them. As you know they're pretty easy to remove and put back.

 

[crank2211]

So I just tried replacing the bearings in my MP10 dryside with the 7x14x5 bearings I ordered from boca. From everything I've seen that was supposed to be the correct size. Turns out my bearings in my MP10 are sized 6x15x5. Darn.

 

[elinder]

Bummer man. Did you throw them away or save them. As you know they're pretty easy to remove and put back.

I've still got them but don't know if I could put stuff back together, LOL

 

[elinder]

I actually just studied your pictures and went and got my stuff and hooked them up. Pretty easy! Thanks for the idea..

 

[crank2211]

I got around to building my float mount for the RA floats. I picked up a thin piece of acrylic and nylon screw and butterfly nut a little while ago. I made the mount so that the float portion can slide up and down the mount portion. This lets me fine tune the height of the floats in the 3rd chamber. All together the project cost me a few dollars and an hour or so of my time. This was my first attempt at bending acrylic. Having thin acrylic and a mini torch to tackle the job with made it surprisingly easy. I have the second switch a bit higher than the main one to act as a fail safe. I didn't plan out the placement of my drip tubes too well. It was close, but I was worried that the supp's would drip right on the floats. I used a scrap piece of acrylic and some silicone to make a little shield to redirect the drops should they want to land on the floats.



Here's the final product:

I still have find some spare wire and extend the wires to the head unit of my Reef Angel. I also need to code up the ATO behavior. Before I do any of that though, I want to pick up the expansion relay box because as it stands, I'm all out of available relays on my original box.

More to come..

 

[crank2211]

And some quick pics of the tank I just took: