Water cooled leds

jestronix

New member
Hi all,

I finished off my water cooled led light over the weekend, I'm using 3 cree modules of 20 leds each.

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I decided to go watercooled as I could have a very minimal look and it's extremely easy to pull the heat away from the leds.
 
Haha that sounds like something i would do. I was actually thinking about using mine as a heater in the winter to save on electricity. I couldnt come up with a cost effective solution for some titanium heatsinks for in the actual tank itself to transfer the heat though. In turn that would also cool the lights without fans.
 
Haha that sounds like something i would do. I was actually thinking about using mine as a heater in the winter to save on electricity. I couldnt come up with a cost effective solution for some titanium heatsinks for in the actual tank itself to transfer the heat though. In turn that would also cool the lights without fans.

Don't worry I've also thought the same thing, only thing I could find was those drop in chiller coils, or coil up a heap of hose in the sump. There is a TOTM that used a pond outside to cool and heat his tank, used some kind of cooling tube that was non toxic, stuff for heating floors, no chiller no heaters , worked really well.

On my next sump I'm thinking of adding a long side chamber that I could use to heat my tank with light heat, don't know how much effect it would have.

Also in summer I can run the hose outside to the radiator, no heat inside the house, but how far do u go with these diy things ?
 
I like the idea and it is much more efficient and I am sure that your led's are running much cooler. Please if you can share some pictures of the led's you are using and what type and size of the optic you are using.?
 
Quite a few have tossed around the idea, but I've never seen it implemented.

Please post more details of the setup, heatsinks, circ pumps, where the heat is going, etc.

Looks nice.
 
Cpu radiator for cooling, handles about 140w of leds,

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Cree xte chips , I also run full spectrum Crees for the other two lights, time will tell.

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I run no lenses, but do run reflectors.

Soon to be running on my new 130 gallon cube ! I'll probably run six on that.
 
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I also get zero disco on these, tight matrix leds like these also make for easy soldering , gone are the days of soldering all those stars. I love not having to have big bulky *** heat sinks over my tank, keen to do some tests this winter with feeding the heat back into the tank.
 
Nice. It would be nice to use the heat for the tank, but I can see how it would be impractical. It would be hard to make it yourself, but I can envision ways of concealing the plumbing in a support to make it look even cleaner. I doubt commercial manufacturers would start doing this, though; a fan is much cheaper and less likely to have issues.

do you have any over-temp protection?
 
Your right more points of failure, however there are off the shelf cpu coolers that are protecting some expensive equipment too. I could see a very clean polished off the shelf system that might sell. People pay stupid amounts for housing some cree leds

Currently no failure protection, but I'm still looking for a sensor I can slip under the leds, I know there is off the shelf pc equipment for this.

mmmm now to track down a little titanium :)
 
Cool project and better looking tank but... Devils Advocate here Kessil = 42 x 2 watt chips and Radion = ~ 36 chips some 3 watt and some 5 watt and they are not over heating in their minimal frame.
 
Cool project and better looking tank but... Devils Advocate here Kessil = 42 x 2 watt chips and Radion = ~ 36 chips some 3 watt and some 5 watt and they are not over heating in their minimal frame.

Your right, Kessil housing is sweet, but out of my price range. 400ish for the 360 ? is the fan in a kessil easy to clean or replace ?

I paid $30 for the chip, 60w
cpu water block $7
pump $5 shared
radiator & fan about $5 per light shared
driver $30 meanwell
wire $5

So around $80 per 60w so in reality i can have 5 (300w) of cree full spectrum over my tank for one 360. Dont get me wrong id love 5 kessil over my tank anyday, i just dont have that kinda money.
 
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