Anybody running a DIY LED for a planted tank?

[Jstdv8]

Some older threads seem to indicate there wasn't much in the LED line available for the spectrum that plants require to make clorophyl.
Just wondering if there are any updates on this and if any of you have any pics of succesfully lit DIY LED tanks.
Seems to be taking off in the SW world and I am wanting to do one on my saltwater tank but thought I'd get my feet wet with a less expensive build on my dad's FW tank first.
I was thinking that with freshwater the power of the light does not need to be as intense as SW so probably 1w bulbs instead of the 3w's the SW uses.

Any input would be appreciated or links to FW planted build threads I didn't find while searching.

Thanks

 

[Subroto]

Food for thought, indeed! I have come across threads scattered all over various forums that suggest that planted aquarium enthusiasts have tried their hands at illuminating their FW tanks with DIY LED. Data, however, is scant as to their success rates.

This post however is not in reply to your query Jstdv8, but my questions seem to be relevant to this thread that you started and hence thought I would ask my questions here.

Visual appeal of the illumination is the first and foremost to consider; that is what we keep our tanks for. If we go by the Kelvin rating only, and select an LED only for its K rating, which may be very efficient in providing intensity in the blue and the red spectrum, won't we miss a point? In layman's words, we see the color in an object which does not abosorb that color of the light spectrum and reflects it. As the green spectrum is not considered as useful or beneficial for the photosynthesis process, lights are being manufatured that provide its output in the useful blue and the red spectrum and emission in the green and the yellow spectrum is minimised to the point of exclusion. No wonder, there are posts in planted tank forums that lament the 'washed out' look of an LED-lighted aquarium. Certainly, there are planted tank enthusiasts among us who have tried both tri-phosphor, full-spectrum lights and LED lights on their tanks.

I would appreciate if we can hear from them on this forum. It would be really interesting to learn from the experience of those aquarists who have hands-on experience in using, say T5HO vis-a-vis LED.

Thanks

 

[Haydn24]

Food for thought, indeed! I have come across threads scattered all over various forums that suggest that planted aquarium enthusiasts have tried their hands at illuminating their FW tanks with DIY LED. Data, however, is scant as to their success rates.

This post however is not in reply to your query Jstdv8, but my questions seem to be relevant to this thread that you started and hence thought I would ask my questions here.

Visual appeal of the illumination is the first and foremost to consider; that is what we keep our tanks for. If we go by the Kelvin rating only, and select an LED only for its K rating, which may be very efficient in providing intensity in the blue and the red spectrum, won't we miss a point? In layman's words, we see the color in an object which does not abosorb that color of the light spectrum and reflects it. As the green spectrum is not considered as useful or beneficial for the photosynthesis process, lights are being manufatured that provide its output in the useful blue and the red spectrum and emission in the green and the yellow spectrum is minimised to the point of exclusion. No wonder, there are posts in planted tank forums that lament the 'washed out' look of an LED-lighted aquarium. Certainly, there are planted tank enthusiasts among us who have tried both tri-phosphor, full-spectrum lights and LED lights on their tanks.

I would appreciate if we can hear from them on this forum. It would be really interesting to learn from the experience of those aquarists who have hands-on experience in using, say T5HO vis-a-vis LED.

Thanks

:O Welcome to AC.

 

[Jstdv8]

bump

 

[DoctaQ]

i run a high light planted tank and the washed outness that sub describes is true to a point but not as crazy noticable as you would think.
leds can definateley grow plants, aquatic or otherwise.

1w leds are mostly junk, you can get a 3w and drive it to a lower power. that will almost always produce more light than a 1w led.

what size tank are you lookng to light?

 

[Subroto]

Thanks Haydn24 for the welcome! Thanks DoctaQ for clarifying the point on "washed out syndrome" under LED. It more or less confirms what I read in other posts. It is a personal choice then whether we would like to live with it by embracing a new technology or stay with the tried and trusted one till something equally good or better comes along with the improvement/evolution of LED.

As to your question DoctaQ, I am planning to light a 72"x24"x24" planted, with about 2 to 3" substrate.

 

[DoctaQ]

thats gonna be a major job, you would probably need something like 70 or more leds with optics.

my tank thread has pics, the most recent ones i posted (terrible pictures) are my tank under led, i might take some more tonight if there is interest. if its any conselation you can mix in warmer colors of leds to bring out more reds and greens, the cree xp-g warm white can get 107 lm per watt

 

[Jstdv8]

i run a high light planted tank and the washed outness that sub describes is true to a point but not as crazy noticable as you would think.
leds can definateley grow plants, aquatic or otherwise.

1w leds are mostly junk, you can get a 3w and drive it to a lower power. that will almost always produce more light than a 1w led.

what size tank are you lookng to light?

I was thinking the 3w ligths might jsut be too much.
We've allready been told by a few plant folks that the lights we have are overkill, and coming from a SW background I'm aware that 4x 65w PC lighting isnt that great (at least not for lighting corals)
So my thought process was that if PC's are overkill I should be looking at a low end LED or I'm gonna burn the plants up, not to mention the 1w LEd's should be cheaper.
From everything I've read about teh saltwater LED's is the only thing holding the 1w bulbs back is that they don't penetrate deep enough in 25" plus deep tanks. Some of the high end LED's for SW are still powered by 1w LED's (Like ecoexotics) and they do jsut fine from what I read as long as the tank is shallow.

Soooooo, I was thinking the 3w would be more expensive and just too much. any thoughts there?

Got any pics that show the coloring of your tank very good?

what coloration are you using for you bulbs? What percentage of each color? Did you go dimmable?

my dad has a 75 gallon 4' standard tank

Thanks DrQ

 

[Jstdv8]

I saw the link to your LED build.
Maybe I'm going aboutt his all wrong, I was thinking there would be lots of LED's like a SW setup, you only have 6 in a 30" tank, so I'm looking at something like 12 lights for a 75? So instead of going with smaller lights, I go with the 3w lights and jsut use less of them? Is that what you're thinking here?

 

[DoctaQ]

js, the 75 that is 48x18x21 is what im going for here.
the 70 leds would have been for sub's monster tank.
1w leds are very much junk, they might not last as long and you are pretty much only going to find chinese knock offs that are also undocumented. you can run 3w leds at 1w and get much better performance. think of car mileage as an analogy.

for your 75 gal tank i would go for something like 36 leds.
my 20 gal has 8 leds actually as i was not happy with the coverage that 6 gave me.

if you can mount a few inches off the top of the tank and are willing to experiment a little you could possibly go as low as 24 leds. i lit a 55 gal with 18 leds once but that is not as wide.

for color i went with a 67k flavor of the cool white xr-e, if you show me where you are going to get your leds before you do i can help you look up the chromacity chart to see what kind of color you are looking at. getting a lower color temp like in the 6.4k range is generally more pleasing to the eye. if i were to redo my setup i would probably mix up some neutrals in there and go with any of the xp series. maybe even the xml

im driving some by dimmable although i just have it set at 700, and dont bother, i just happened to have a dimmable driver sitting around.

i would probably go with some dealextreme driver as they are cheap and IME quite reliable. ive used 4 different kinds of drivers for over 8k hours so far, all with no problems.