DIY LED HELP

My Radions XR30W do the acclimation over a 7 - 8 week period, the adjustments are minimal over the period of time, secondly the LED's going onto existing MH Lighting system and are just for night accetics for viewing purpose. There was a program on National geographic where the show corals mainly feed at night under lower colour spectrum. this was a David Attenborough documentary called Blue Planet.

Many of you guys have much to say about my ligthts and so forth, what have you done to try and improve and help with in the hobby!

If you guys have nothing positive to say , please keep your comments to yourselves or PM me to discuss.

I have put more DIY into this hobby than most have and this at no cost and giving hours and hours of my personal time to try help others!
 
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Great Barrier Reef is losing 30% of it's corals in 9 months. You want to do it in just 8 weeks?


According to National Geographic, the main reason for coral bleaching is the increase in sea temperatures which coral are unable to handle, there is no mention of coral spectrums causing coral bleaching and corals dying off.

In fact my corals have increased dramatically over the past 3 months with my DIY LED's that I am at the point of starting to frag already.
 
PAR is not always the be all and end all, there are other factors to consider too. Had LED chips that pushed out 2000 par at the surface, which is pretty much midday sun, and my softies melted away, plus my red fish turned black. Plus if PAR is your only consideration, you can just run grow lights, which are red lights and a little blue, as that should give you the most PAR per watt, but it is going to look horrible on a display. A nice tool I have found when designing DIY LED lighting, is this website below. You put in the chip quantities you intend to use and it draws you a spectral diagram and give you a score out of 100 considering a few components like par and fluorescence:

 
You should share some tips how to do "acclimatising slowly" process please. It will save so much time testing and adjusting tank parameters all the time.

It is quite a well known method in the hobby to acclimate your corals to new lights slowly over the course of a few months. Almost all the name brand units have this functionality built in. A big sudden change in light can cause them to stress and bleach.
 
It is quite a well known method in the hobby to acclimate your corals to new lights slowly over the course of a few months. Almost all the name brand units have this functionality built in. A big sudden change in light can cause them to stress and bleach.

The well know brand is what I mention further up in my post when this was brought up, with the like of ZETligtt ZT 6600 does not have this on the standard IR remote system unless you use the Horizan app, my ZT6600 with the controller I use you can program this via usb, the only part is the user has to select the mode which the and user can decide if they want to slowly acclimatize over their desired period of time let it be 2 weeks or 12 months, just depending on when the user selects the next setup period.
 
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PAR is not always the be all and end all, there are other factors to consider too. Had LED chips that pushed out 2000 par at the surface, which is pretty much midday sun, and my softies melted away, plus my red fish turned black. Plus if PAR is your only consideration, you can just run grow lights, which are red lights and a little blue, as that should give you the most PAR per watt, but it is going to look horrible on a display. A nice tool I have found when designing DIY LED lighting, is this website below. You put in the chip quantities you intend to use and it draws you a spectral diagram and give you a score out of 100 considering a few components like par and fluorescence:

Great simulator, thanks for sharing. Will try it out with different scenarios for interest sake if nothing else. Nice tech for sure.
I can only speak for myself here but my view on PAR is that it is a starting point. A necessary one at that. OP discarded this delay in his quick-fix search, citing the guy in PE as being "unwilling" to help.
I'm glad he is now being helped by Royden, who knows his stuff - his work speaks for itself both in attention to detail and aesthetics (this is how you spell it btw).
Royden is not giving him a quick fix. As stated a lot of work goes into this process. The acclimation will take time too but now because other phrasiology has been used and direct request for PAR omitted, all is fine.
What bothers me to be honest is the outright rejection of PAR as another of the factors to be considered, the personal and unprovoked attack on said "PE guy" and of course the assumption that he rips off fellow hobbyists. In my humble opinion making a living is still legal and as such the average LFS charges a markup on what they sell too. Very often selling faulty products that are substandard and fail for whatever reason.
If you have the expertise to help out a fellow hobbyist and choose to do so at zero financial gain, that is your right. It doesn't make you an authority on anything and certainly doesn't make a business owner, with a different opinion to yours, wrong for asking for standard information. Asking all the rest of the details like what controllers and what existing LED is just another way to extrapolate a theoretical PAR. So here we are anyway back at the original question.
My 2c is that the aquarium community, fresh and marine, needs to start demonstrating the tranquility we claim our tanks give us and stop snarking each other whenever the opportunities arise. If you have other income streams and help out in the hobby "just for the love of it" it does not give you the right to slate vendors in the hobby who make a living from it. Just my opinion.
Personally im looking forward to see how this project turns out.
 
Guys, less snide comments and more great info please. Don't ruin a great thread. Some comments have been deleted.
 
We are waiting for the parts from laser cutting and bending which should be ready within the next day or two. So hopefully this coming weekend will be assembly and Duppie can install the following week.
 
We are waiting for the parts from laser cutting and bending which should be ready within the next day or two. So hopefully this coming weekend will be assembly and Duppie can install the following week.
Thank you :thumbup:
 
Creating Duppies list of items needed to complete the build and if all goes to plan, I can collect the parts before I return to PE on Friday from Cape Town.

I have decided to design probably 6 different lights, mainly rectangle units for marine and fresh water systems, I have spoken to 2 LFS, one in PE and one in Cape Town who are interested in marketing these units, I have ordered parts to marine each shop a marine unit as a demo model and customers are more than welcome to view and see the build, play with preloaded programs as well as ask shop owners to run the demo model which speeds up a 24hr program in 4 mins.

I will keep posted on this when they are complete and provide the names of the LFS.
 
Creating Duppies list of items needed to complete the build and if all goes to plan, I can collect the parts before I return to PE on Friday from Cape Town.

I have decided to design probably 6 different lights, mainly rectangle units for marine and fresh water systems, I have spoken to 2 LFS, one in PE and one in Cape Town who are interested in marketing these units, I have ordered parts to marine each shop a marine unit as a demo model and customers are more than welcome to view and see the build, play with preloaded programs as well as ask shop owners to run the demo model which speeds up a 24hr program in 4 mins.

I will keep posted on this when they are complete and provide the names of the LFS.
Sounds awesome... Its nice to see LFS marketing locally made products. :m106:
Maybe you can get someone on board in Gauteng too....
Otherwise we'll just get it from you :lol:
 
Hi Royden following your build with interest. Just not clear on the drivers you will be using between the LED's and TC420 controller. thx
 
Hi Royden following your build with interest. Just not clear on the drivers you will be using between the LED's and TC420 controller. thx
I use dimmable drivers, 3x3w and 10w drivers. Drivers are current limiting drivers so your voltage input is 12v but ur output is always around 2v less due to circuit design and resistance.
 
One also has to keep in mind the forward voltage and voltage required for the led. Some are 2v, 2.4v,3v and 3.2-3.4v. As for psu I run them between 12.8v and 13.4v.
 
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