mtrcyclefish
Member
Here's my entry into LED's. I picked up everything from Bill at Reefledlights.com. He's a great guy to deal with and extremely knowledgeable. He has a real interest in reefing and LED's, so dealing with him is nothing like dealing with your typical vendor. Anything you need or want to know about these lights, Bill will have the answer.
Here's my starting point. It looks like an intimidating pile of parts, but the build wasn't bad.
I built my fuge light first (AKA "practice")
Wired
Drivers attached
And the money shot
With this being the fuge light I wasn't concerned with controlling the blues separately from the whites. They're wired together with non-dimmable driver drivers. I felt fairly confident with how this small build went, so I moved on to my display unit.
Figuring out the placement of the LED's was difficult. I wanted even coverage and also had to keep in mind how they were going to be wired to the controllers. If you look at the wiring on the left you can see that my planning worked out well. The wiring on the right... not so much. I placed the LED's in even rows of 20, with the positive side facing toward the left. If I were to do it again I would have made 5 rows of 24 instead of 6 rows of 20 and I would have had the positive sides of the LED's facing toward the far left and right. That would have made wiring a little easier and would have made it look a bit nicer.
To mount the drivers I used 1" flat aluminum. I cut and bent it and drilled and tapped the fins of the heat sink to mount the aluminum. Then I bolted the drivers to the flat aluminum. I did the same thing for the fuses and resistors and used some left over adhesive to mount the resistors.
After adjusting the drivers I closed it all up with some 3/16" aluminum sheet I got on Ebay. I cut it to length and took it to a local shop to have them bend it. It was fairly difficult to find a shop that had the machine to bend it. In the end they charged me $35 and the bends were perfect. To me that was money well spent. I could have probably figured out a way to bend it, but it would have never looked as good as having the right machine to do it on. I mounted the fans into the cover with all 4 fans in the center and 2 exhaust holes in the ends.
Here's my starting point. It looks like an intimidating pile of parts, but the build wasn't bad.
I built my fuge light first (AKA "practice")
Wired
Drivers attached
And the money shot
With this being the fuge light I wasn't concerned with controlling the blues separately from the whites. They're wired together with non-dimmable driver drivers. I felt fairly confident with how this small build went, so I moved on to my display unit.
Figuring out the placement of the LED's was difficult. I wanted even coverage and also had to keep in mind how they were going to be wired to the controllers. If you look at the wiring on the left you can see that my planning worked out well. The wiring on the right... not so much. I placed the LED's in even rows of 20, with the positive side facing toward the left. If I were to do it again I would have made 5 rows of 24 instead of 6 rows of 20 and I would have had the positive sides of the LED's facing toward the far left and right. That would have made wiring a little easier and would have made it look a bit nicer.
To mount the drivers I used 1" flat aluminum. I cut and bent it and drilled and tapped the fins of the heat sink to mount the aluminum. Then I bolted the drivers to the flat aluminum. I did the same thing for the fuses and resistors and used some left over adhesive to mount the resistors.
After adjusting the drivers I closed it all up with some 3/16" aluminum sheet I got on Ebay. I cut it to length and took it to a local shop to have them bend it. It was fairly difficult to find a shop that had the machine to bend it. In the end they charged me $35 and the bends were perfect. To me that was money well spent. I could have probably figured out a way to bend it, but it would have never looked as good as having the right machine to do it on. I mounted the fans into the cover with all 4 fans in the center and 2 exhaust holes in the ends.
