Hmmmm, forum seems to be having some issues. A lot of icons for editing the posts are now coming up as their alternate text on Chrome. I hope that gets fixed soon, not much maintenance being done to the site here these days.
Anyway, long time coming on this post. May not seem like much, but this is my continued rebuild of the MaxSpect LED's. I've been having driver failures and have been hobbling along for a while. I wasn't using the big coral-burning 60w LED units since they killed my Monti, so I've been swapping around drivers in the 3w LED circuits to keep the lights working. These lights are old, yes, but I also had 4 of the drivers fail within the first year when they were still 'new'. So I've been expecting and planning for them to die.
This is my long-term solution.
The top half of this picture is the original MaxSpect drivers and distribution board. The original distro board isn't bad at all, nor is the controller board, but the drivers are garbage. Very high failure rate and poor quality manufacturing. Such a disappointing purchase, but I paid a lot originally and I'm stubborn. So I WILL make these stupid things work properly and MaxSpect won't get another penny of my money in the process.
Bottom half of the photo is the custom distribution board I designed, which mimic's the function of the original, but lets me use Meanwell drivers. The unit on the left is a 12v power supply that powers the control board, relay circuits, and fans. The white blocks are the new LED drivers. I've got two channels I'm currently using but can add back in that third channel at some point too. I'm a bit crunched for space since the Meanwell drivers are a lot larger but don't currently have any LED's that would use that last channel in the pendants. I'm going with 500mA drivers for now, but can also bump up to either 700 or 1050 by just swapping the driver. Not exactly an efficient way to control output but it'll work till I decide I'm ready for a more modern set of fixtures.
If I can find a way to shoehorn that third module into the housing I'd like to add about a half dozen cool blue and half dozen more deep blue in there for a bit more punch and pop. Maybe some UV, I don't know. That's a later discussion. Either way, I've finally got reliable lighting. I've also enjoyed doing the rebuilds and learned a lot more about LED circuits in the process.
In the meantime, if I can find one more unit of these lights out there, I'd love to do a similar rebuild and add a third fixture to the tank. I've got a few more of the distro boards and can always get more LED's.