OK, let me start out with I am NOT an expert"¦ not even close! In fact I am writing this HOPING some experts will chime in and make some changes in my tank, and how I am doing things.
Now, what I am doing here is I am going to put everything I have learned, my thoughts process, and a TON of stuff I have learned and hoping it will save someone else from having to work as hard as I did to learn everything.
Now, what do I have, and what am I trying to do:
800gal show tank"¦ planning on SPS corals
DIY LED lights "“ I am going with MakersLED head sync rail and controlers and CREE LEDs (mostly cree, some exotic as well).
MakersLED
I went with MakersLED sync because of ease and support. I am quite sure I could have built my own sync, but why? They also have some great controllers and other people who support or have info on the MakersLED.
Cree bulbs"¦ they just seem to be the standard. 3W Cree bulbs, most of which are at 700mA (but be sure to check that).
Now, lets get into some info I worked on and how I came to some of the numbers I have:
Light spread"¦ AKA what lens to chose
First LED's are not so much about wattage, light, and really you want to get right down to it PAR. But how do you know how much light you need on your tank.
First the LED bulbs mostly come with bulbs that spread out 120° or more. So you get a lot of light that is going out the sides of your tank, and not down on your coral. So one of the most important things which lens you use. Here is a nice table I have found to help with your lens. The big determining factor is how deep your tank is. The big thing is not so much how deep your tank is, but how far the lights are above the bottom
Under 25" None
25" - 29" 80°
30" - 37" 60°
38" - 45" 40°
46" and over 20°
So since my tank is 48" deep I am going to need 20° lenses.
Quantity of lights"¦ AKA home many you are going to need
This again depends on depth, but it mostly depends on the square inches of your tank surface (or bottom).
So take the legends and width of your tank, multiply these together. Take this number and divide the number corresponding to the table and you will have the number of lights you will need
Under 12" one for ever 20 inches square
12-30" one for ever 15 inches square
Over 30" one for ever 12 inches square
My tank is 84"x48", so that's 4,032 square inches of surface area.
My tank is over 30", so we will need 1 LED for ever 12sq/in
So I am going to need about 336 LEDs.
Another formula I have seen is that for every 24"x24"x24" area, you want to use around 8x NW, 16x RB, and 4x blue. For my tank that works out to 256 RB, 128 W, and 64 B. So these are both in the same ballpark
Spectrum "¦ AKA what color
We have the number of bulbs we need, but that is only part of the LED story. The spectrum is very important.
Corals (and algae) use certain colors of light for their photosynthesis. It is beyond my goals to go into that, just know the most important ones are blue.
You base colors are: Neutral XT-E royal blue, cree xt-e white, and XP-E2 blue in a 4:2:1 ratio
4 XT-E royal blue
2 XT-E white
1 XP-E2 blue
Now, this is just the base colors. If you use nothing but these colors you should do great. I mean if you use nothing but white you should be OK; but, this does not totally fit into the two goals of lighting (in this order):
1. To provide opium lighting for health coral growth
2. To provide the opium lighting for viewing the colors in your coral
Here are a few notes I have on the different colors.
So, we know we need a base lighting of royal blue, white, and blue.
In addition to this we really do need to add something further down the violet range, and we need just about as many of these as we do the Royal blue.
Then we get into some of the other things, which really are just there to bring out some of the different colors in the corals.
Basically you want the fast majority of your lights to be Royal and violet. Then white, and blue. Then a few more of the other colors, just to fill in some of the color spectrum.
My numbers--- at least my best guess!
So, lets get back to my tank, and how many I am going to use. First I am going to give you the numbers I am going to use, and then I am going to tell you why.
336 base colors
I basically took an excel spread sheet and started playing with the numbers until the 4:2:1 ratio worked out to 336. That worked out to
192 Royal blue
96 White, Neutral
48 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
156 Hyper violet
36 True violet
So that is my ideal. I don't know that it is realistic in any way shape or form, but it is my ideal starting point. Plus, any by totally accident, it comes out to a nice even 600 LEDs.
How we got here"¦ AKA, beware the trigonometry!!!
Before we move on I would like to talk about how I came to some of those numbers. Specifically the 18's, and how they really should be more like 27's, maybe even 36!?!
(As an aside I will say that this is very likely too much of the red, turquoise, warm white, and cool blue"¦ but in order to get the coverage over all the tank I needed this large a quantity. The good news about having this many is I can have most of them on their own channel, so I can turn each color down as needed. It will be easy to do as I may end up with as many as 60 different channels!)
First lets take a look at the heat sync rail we are looking at.
http://www.clay-boa.com/product_images/e/580/nano_reef_makersled_dimensions__43878_zoom.png
A few numbers:
The entire rail is 6.45" wide
There are 5 lanes of LEDs, and the widest LED's will be 2.77" apart.
The rail sticks out another 1.8375" past these outer LEDs.
Next I needed to know how much light was on the bottom of the tank from each LED. Here are my knows:
The lens is 20°
The tank is 48" deep
The water is up to the overflow, which is below the top rim of the tank
The LED is some distance over the water"¦ so lets just call it 50" from the LED to the bottom of the tank.
A little trigonometry, split to get a right angle triangle solve for Tangent(10)x50 and you have that the radius of the beam is just under 9". (increase the distance 51" or 52" and you basically have 9"). So lets call it 9", so each LED shine a 18" circle on the bottom of the tank.
I once put in a sprinkler system for my parents. One of the important points is you didn't put the sprinkler heads one diameter apart, you put them a radius apart. You want to make sure one head reaches the next head. Doing that you turn down so that each head puts out half as much as you need because it has totally duplicate coverage by the ones next to it. You also will not have large holes that are not covered. I took this same idea to the lights. Make sure every light reaches to the center of the next light. Using this logic no light should be anymore than 9" from the next one of the same color.
Back to the trig!
Lets look at say red (mostly because red is short to type). You want to totally cover the bottom of the tank with red, but at an absolute minimal amount. So you want all red LED's exactly 9" apart. No more, no less. If you have less space between you will duplicate too much. If you more space between you will have holes where there is no red.
So if we only mount the red on the outer channels they will be 2.775" apart. If you picture a right triangle you have the short leg equal to 2.775", and the hypotenuse 9". Square each, add, and square root, and you have that there needs to be a red every 8.56" down the rail. With a 72" rail that comes out to about 9 along the rail.
Now, if the rest of the rail is 1.8375" beyond the outside lane, and you want the same 2.7" between"¦ well that is shot, you already have 3.6" between. So you can do some craziness, or just accept that you have what you have and there will be a line of less red between the two rails.
So now I just throw this all out, and say lets make 3 rails, and lets put three evenly spread three rails across the tank. This will put each rail 5.55" apart, and leave a gap of about 1.6" between the rails and along the edges. I figure that is acceptable. Especially as it directly under the LED where the light would be the strongest.
Now one more thing we need to look at. The rail can handle 30 LEDs per foot, so can we put that many LED's on 3 72" rails. The answer is no. We have 18' of heat sync, and if we max them out at 30 per foot we are only able to 540 LED's. And to be perfectly honest I know the worst thing you can do to an LED is keep it hot.
So now I am looking at 4 72" rails just to hold all the LED's I need! Wow!
198 Royal blue
99 White, Neutral
50 Blue
36 White, Warm
36 Cool Blue
36 Turquoise
36 Deep Red
144 Hyper violet
36 True violet
671 total LED's
4 rails.
Again, I feel this is a high number. By other calculations I have made I had just over 400 LED's on two rails. But trying to follow the numbers this is where I am.
So, lets go through several variations I am playing with, and lets see if any of them make any more sense that another
Now this is the first numbers I have been working with. I will be honest I have no idea where exactly I got these numbers. As I recall I extrapolated them from another person who posted their LED schematic. I liked this because"¦well because 421 LED's are a lot cheaper than 670!
133 Royal blue
83 White, Neutral
44 Blue
6 White, Warm
10 Cool Blue
10 Turquoise
10 Deep Red
125 Hyper violet
0 True violet
421 Total LED's
Option two. This is the first attempt at me creating my own calculations as laid out above.
192 Royal blue
96 White, Neutral
48 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
156 Hyper violet
36 True violet
600 Total LED's
After looking at what it would take, and really running the math to it's fullest, I came to the conclusion that 600 was just not enough. To get a full even spread of all the lighting. So I increased the numbers to run on 4 rails.
198 Royal blue
99 White, Neutral
50 Blue
36 White, Warm
36 Cool Blue
36 Turquoise
36 Deep Red
144 Hyper violet
36 True violet
671 Total LED's
Hoping I could get away with"¦ well less I got looking at the controllers. If I have one controller at each end (8 total as we are now talking about 4 heat sync rails), we would have a total of 560 LED's that could be run on the 40 different channels. So how about a schematic that will only use 560 LED's.
189 Royal blue
94 White, Neutral
47 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
140 Hyper violet
18 True violet
560 Total LED's
In the end I think I am going to push more for the 671 number. It may be over kill"¦ but it is not hugely over kill. It also means that I am going to be building lights for a very long time. I am going to order enough for one now, and wont build the next one until"¦ well later. It also means that I will not be ready for SPS for quite some time"¦ but maybe I can at the least get something going in my tank!
I also will be looking at the number of cooling fans. One thing I very much don't like about the makers drivers is they only support one fan each. I am going to need to put some kind of relay or transistor to allow the single to turn on a whole string of fans. I'm just not sure exactly how many... but I know I have to keep these diodes cool!
Thank you all, and I would greatly appreciate any input on this! I will be sure to update you as I go.
Now, what I am doing here is I am going to put everything I have learned, my thoughts process, and a TON of stuff I have learned and hoping it will save someone else from having to work as hard as I did to learn everything.
Now, what do I have, and what am I trying to do:
800gal show tank"¦ planning on SPS corals
DIY LED lights "“ I am going with MakersLED head sync rail and controlers and CREE LEDs (mostly cree, some exotic as well).
MakersLED
I went with MakersLED sync because of ease and support. I am quite sure I could have built my own sync, but why? They also have some great controllers and other people who support or have info on the MakersLED.
Cree bulbs"¦ they just seem to be the standard. 3W Cree bulbs, most of which are at 700mA (but be sure to check that).
Now, lets get into some info I worked on and how I came to some of the numbers I have:
Light spread"¦ AKA what lens to chose
First LED's are not so much about wattage, light, and really you want to get right down to it PAR. But how do you know how much light you need on your tank.
First the LED bulbs mostly come with bulbs that spread out 120° or more. So you get a lot of light that is going out the sides of your tank, and not down on your coral. So one of the most important things which lens you use. Here is a nice table I have found to help with your lens. The big determining factor is how deep your tank is. The big thing is not so much how deep your tank is, but how far the lights are above the bottom
Under 25" None
25" - 29" 80°
30" - 37" 60°
38" - 45" 40°
46" and over 20°
So since my tank is 48" deep I am going to need 20° lenses.
Quantity of lights"¦ AKA home many you are going to need
This again depends on depth, but it mostly depends on the square inches of your tank surface (or bottom).
So take the legends and width of your tank, multiply these together. Take this number and divide the number corresponding to the table and you will have the number of lights you will need
Under 12" one for ever 20 inches square
12-30" one for ever 15 inches square
Over 30" one for ever 12 inches square
My tank is 84"x48", so that's 4,032 square inches of surface area.
My tank is over 30", so we will need 1 LED for ever 12sq/in
So I am going to need about 336 LEDs.
Another formula I have seen is that for every 24"x24"x24" area, you want to use around 8x NW, 16x RB, and 4x blue. For my tank that works out to 256 RB, 128 W, and 64 B. So these are both in the same ballpark
Spectrum "¦ AKA what color
We have the number of bulbs we need, but that is only part of the LED story. The spectrum is very important.
Corals (and algae) use certain colors of light for their photosynthesis. It is beyond my goals to go into that, just know the most important ones are blue.
You base colors are: Neutral XT-E royal blue, cree xt-e white, and XP-E2 blue in a 4:2:1 ratio
4 XT-E royal blue
2 XT-E white
1 XP-E2 blue
Now, this is just the base colors. If you use nothing but these colors you should do great. I mean if you use nothing but white you should be OK; but, this does not totally fit into the two goals of lighting (in this order):
1. To provide opium lighting for health coral growth
2. To provide the opium lighting for viewing the colors in your coral
Here are a few notes I have on the different colors.
- "¢ cree xt-e royal blue (133)
- o base LEDs used in aquarium lighting as the blue light
- o for moonlight when turned down
- "¢ cree xp-e2 blue (44)
- o used in combination with neutral white and royal blue
- o one XP-E2 blue for every four XT-E royal blue for a ~14K look.
- "¢ Using more than that can be detrimental, as our eyes can pick blue out much better than royal blue and the color of the light can quickly turn into a Windex blue.
- "¢ cree xt-e white, Neutral (83)
- o base LEDs used in aquarium lighting
- "¢ add in other colors to supplement if necessary
- "¢ cree xt-e white, Warm (6)
- o base LEDs used in aquarium lighting
- "¢ add in other colors to supplement if necessary
- "¢ cool blue - 470nm (10)
- o bring your oranges and reds out in your corals
- o small amounts on a tank as it will quickly over power other colors
- "¢ turquoise - 495nm (10)
- o mixed with 660nm Deep Red and 455nm Royal Blue
- o When mixed with the Deep Red and Royal Blue, all 3 colors will display a "White" light but still bring out fluorescent pigments found in corals. to bring out oranges and reds
- o wavelength is almost a green color. The idea behind this wavelength is to fill the missing gap needed to bring out certain colors like reds and oranges in a standard Neutral White + Royal Blue combo
- "¢ and is currently controversial
- "¢ deep red - 660nm (10)
- o mixed with our Turquoise - 495nm and 475nm Cool Blue, reds can be used in more quantities because the overall color of the LEDs becomes white.
- "¢ hyper violet led - 430nm (125)
- o Often mistaken for UV LED, this 430nm LED is in the perfect range for coral growth and fluorescence
- o Combine this with the CREE XT-E Royal Blue, which runs at 455nm, to get the perfect range of Violet / Royal Blue for your corals to make them really "pop"
- o These LEDs will look dim to you because of their 430nm wavelength which is almost outside the range your eyes can see but they will provide incredible PAR for corals.
- "¢ true violet led - 410nm (125)
- o Often mistaken for UV LED, this 410nm LED is in the perfect range for coral growth and fluorescence
- o Very little below 400nm (the cut off for UV)
- o Combine this with the CREE XT-E Royal Blue, which runs at 455nm, to get the perfect range of Violet / Royal Blue for your corals to make them really "pop"
- o These LEDs will look dim to you because of their 410nm wavelength which is almost outside the range your eyes can see but they will provide incredible PAR for corals.
So, we know we need a base lighting of royal blue, white, and blue.
In addition to this we really do need to add something further down the violet range, and we need just about as many of these as we do the Royal blue.
Then we get into some of the other things, which really are just there to bring out some of the different colors in the corals.
Basically you want the fast majority of your lights to be Royal and violet. Then white, and blue. Then a few more of the other colors, just to fill in some of the color spectrum.
My numbers--- at least my best guess!
So, lets get back to my tank, and how many I am going to use. First I am going to give you the numbers I am going to use, and then I am going to tell you why.
336 base colors
I basically took an excel spread sheet and started playing with the numbers until the 4:2:1 ratio worked out to 336. That worked out to
192 Royal blue
96 White, Neutral
48 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
156 Hyper violet
36 True violet
So that is my ideal. I don't know that it is realistic in any way shape or form, but it is my ideal starting point. Plus, any by totally accident, it comes out to a nice even 600 LEDs.
How we got here"¦ AKA, beware the trigonometry!!!
Before we move on I would like to talk about how I came to some of those numbers. Specifically the 18's, and how they really should be more like 27's, maybe even 36!?!
(As an aside I will say that this is very likely too much of the red, turquoise, warm white, and cool blue"¦ but in order to get the coverage over all the tank I needed this large a quantity. The good news about having this many is I can have most of them on their own channel, so I can turn each color down as needed. It will be easy to do as I may end up with as many as 60 different channels!)
First lets take a look at the heat sync rail we are looking at.
http://www.clay-boa.com/product_images/e/580/nano_reef_makersled_dimensions__43878_zoom.png
A few numbers:
The entire rail is 6.45" wide
There are 5 lanes of LEDs, and the widest LED's will be 2.77" apart.
The rail sticks out another 1.8375" past these outer LEDs.
Next I needed to know how much light was on the bottom of the tank from each LED. Here are my knows:
The lens is 20°
The tank is 48" deep
The water is up to the overflow, which is below the top rim of the tank
The LED is some distance over the water"¦ so lets just call it 50" from the LED to the bottom of the tank.
A little trigonometry, split to get a right angle triangle solve for Tangent(10)x50 and you have that the radius of the beam is just under 9". (increase the distance 51" or 52" and you basically have 9"). So lets call it 9", so each LED shine a 18" circle on the bottom of the tank.
I once put in a sprinkler system for my parents. One of the important points is you didn't put the sprinkler heads one diameter apart, you put them a radius apart. You want to make sure one head reaches the next head. Doing that you turn down so that each head puts out half as much as you need because it has totally duplicate coverage by the ones next to it. You also will not have large holes that are not covered. I took this same idea to the lights. Make sure every light reaches to the center of the next light. Using this logic no light should be anymore than 9" from the next one of the same color.
Back to the trig!
Lets look at say red (mostly because red is short to type). You want to totally cover the bottom of the tank with red, but at an absolute minimal amount. So you want all red LED's exactly 9" apart. No more, no less. If you have less space between you will duplicate too much. If you more space between you will have holes where there is no red.
So if we only mount the red on the outer channels they will be 2.775" apart. If you picture a right triangle you have the short leg equal to 2.775", and the hypotenuse 9". Square each, add, and square root, and you have that there needs to be a red every 8.56" down the rail. With a 72" rail that comes out to about 9 along the rail.
Now, if the rest of the rail is 1.8375" beyond the outside lane, and you want the same 2.7" between"¦ well that is shot, you already have 3.6" between. So you can do some craziness, or just accept that you have what you have and there will be a line of less red between the two rails.
So now I just throw this all out, and say lets make 3 rails, and lets put three evenly spread three rails across the tank. This will put each rail 5.55" apart, and leave a gap of about 1.6" between the rails and along the edges. I figure that is acceptable. Especially as it directly under the LED where the light would be the strongest.
Now one more thing we need to look at. The rail can handle 30 LEDs per foot, so can we put that many LED's on 3 72" rails. The answer is no. We have 18' of heat sync, and if we max them out at 30 per foot we are only able to 540 LED's. And to be perfectly honest I know the worst thing you can do to an LED is keep it hot.
So now I am looking at 4 72" rails just to hold all the LED's I need! Wow!
198 Royal blue
99 White, Neutral
50 Blue
36 White, Warm
36 Cool Blue
36 Turquoise
36 Deep Red
144 Hyper violet
36 True violet
671 total LED's
4 rails.
Again, I feel this is a high number. By other calculations I have made I had just over 400 LED's on two rails. But trying to follow the numbers this is where I am.
So, lets go through several variations I am playing with, and lets see if any of them make any more sense that another
Now this is the first numbers I have been working with. I will be honest I have no idea where exactly I got these numbers. As I recall I extrapolated them from another person who posted their LED schematic. I liked this because"¦well because 421 LED's are a lot cheaper than 670!
133 Royal blue
83 White, Neutral
44 Blue
6 White, Warm
10 Cool Blue
10 Turquoise
10 Deep Red
125 Hyper violet
0 True violet
421 Total LED's
Option two. This is the first attempt at me creating my own calculations as laid out above.
192 Royal blue
96 White, Neutral
48 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
156 Hyper violet
36 True violet
600 Total LED's
After looking at what it would take, and really running the math to it's fullest, I came to the conclusion that 600 was just not enough. To get a full even spread of all the lighting. So I increased the numbers to run on 4 rails.
198 Royal blue
99 White, Neutral
50 Blue
36 White, Warm
36 Cool Blue
36 Turquoise
36 Deep Red
144 Hyper violet
36 True violet
671 Total LED's
Hoping I could get away with"¦ well less I got looking at the controllers. If I have one controller at each end (8 total as we are now talking about 4 heat sync rails), we would have a total of 560 LED's that could be run on the 40 different channels. So how about a schematic that will only use 560 LED's.
189 Royal blue
94 White, Neutral
47 Blue
18 White, Warm
18 Cool Blue
18 Turquoise
18 Deep Red
140 Hyper violet
18 True violet
560 Total LED's
In the end I think I am going to push more for the 671 number. It may be over kill"¦ but it is not hugely over kill. It also means that I am going to be building lights for a very long time. I am going to order enough for one now, and wont build the next one until"¦ well later. It also means that I will not be ready for SPS for quite some time"¦ but maybe I can at the least get something going in my tank!
I also will be looking at the number of cooling fans. One thing I very much don't like about the makers drivers is they only support one fan each. I am going to need to put some kind of relay or transistor to allow the single to turn on a whole string of fans. I'm just not sure exactly how many... but I know I have to keep these diodes cool!
Thank you all, and I would greatly appreciate any input on this! I will be sure to update you as I go.
