# DIY LED lighting system...HELP



## Hoppy (Dec 24, 2005)

That is a very difficult question to answer. I can't really do it without a lot more study than I want to put into it right now.


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## [email protected] (Jul 17, 2008)

Hoppy was being overly polite. 
There are several threads on the forum that you need to read in their entirety before jumping into DIY LED lighting. One is a Sticky and very long. Read it through and then the other threads. After that I recommend you go back and skim the long sticky thread again. You'll understand more the second time through. 

LED lighting is getting easier by the month as more people get into it and more products hit the market. If you just want a shopping list, there are two threads that contain them. One if for a 55 gallon tank. I've forgotten what the other one was. 

Or, just go to one of the sites with LED retro fit kits, such as http://www.nanotuners.com/ or 
http://www.rapidled.com/servlet/the-DIY-Retrofit-Kits/Categories


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## thelastlife (Feb 14, 2011)

I can read, read, and do more reading. That does not resolve the question. Sure once I have all the pieces in hand then reading the threads over and over will tell/show me how to piece it all together. The thing is, I READ that for plants to grow the color spectrum needs to be 5500K - 6700K. I read that the PAR needs to be in a certain range for low light, medium light, and high light. Then when I find a bulb that produces 5500K that will place me in the PAR range needed, I am told the bulbs are crap and they will not work. I also read that LED's in general produces a spectrum that is greater than 10000K. Then I read that LED's in general are not efficient in producing light. I hear LED's do not have a half-life. Then I read that the bulb color should be red and blue to optimize growth. Then Hoppy states "A "LED" light doesn't define any specific light. There are bulbs made with LEDs, strips of LEDs, panels of LEDs, aquarium specific LED lights, DIY LED lights, etc. And, those can be with 5 mm LEDs, one watt LEDs, 3 watt LEDs, etc. An LED light can be designed to give just about any PAR at any distance that you want." Then I read that an LED will lose much of its intensity when it goes through glass and water.

No where do I read anyone combining LED lights with compact flourescent lights in a compact flourescent fixture. A fixture that has heatsinks and reflectors and I don't know what else. There is an issue with the heat that the compact flourescent produces and how it will interfere with LED's. Does it become a fire hazard? 

I don't know what makes a LED an "aquarium LED." I know I hear people talk up Cree. But what makes their product an aquarium LED and why is it no one talks about Lemnis or Philips or even Cavet Tech? No one can seem to answer that 'how much LED lights do I need' question for anyone. Yet, we have no problem trying to speculate what amount of LED light is needed for plant growth. 

How much intensity does a LED lose traveling through glass and water and even the distance traveled to hit glass or water? Plants do not receive the same constant color spectrum throughout the day, yet, in our closed environments that is for the most part what we provide. Do plants really thrive under a constant spectrum? Does the need for additional nutrients and CO2 help cover up the constant spectrum? I can read and read and keep questions coming in. I can form answers from what I read and from what I learn. The thing is I do not have the experience behind the questions for me to truly answer any of them. That is why I come to this forum. I believe none of us can really answer all of my questions but I know that several of us on the forum has the experience to chime in and provide an answer based on their own result. The bottom line, what works for you and your tank may not work for me and my tank. I am trying to learn from other's experiences as much as I can so I can make my own assessment of what I need so I can get my tank(s) up and running. Once I feel comfortable learning from others experiences then my own assessments will be up and running and then maybe I can provide solid input to this hobby.


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## !shadow! (Jan 25, 2010)

I wish l could help but honestly I feel people are still trying to figure out everything there is to know about led's including myself. It's nothing like compact florescent or t5ho's or even metal halides where we have a better idea/understanding of how the light works, spectrum, intensity. I do agree on you on that there is a lot of contradictions on the subject and it's hard trying to figure out the truth on them and yes it'll be time consuming to try to experiment and figure them out. I personally do a lot of ....yes you guessed it READING because like Einstein said it "knowledge is power". Reef/saltwater forums really like to get into that kind of stuff from what I've been browsing around and they don't mind helping you out(most of the time). I know it's frustrating trying to figure out led's and what kinds work best for what type of tank and you're not the only one but once you figure it out you'll be glad you did. Here is a interesting thread l saw a couple weeks ago. Hopefully you'll find it useful and helpful in what you're trying to achieve.

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/lighting/127304-catalina-aquarium-leds.html


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## thelastlife (Feb 14, 2011)

Thank you !Shadow!. 

More or less, I feel you are 100% correct. I think LED's are still too new for anyone to be able to give me a solid answer. I was hoping that someone out there has had this idea and failed miserably at it or was able to do it successfully. 

The more I read on plant growth the more I learn that I need to understand sunlight better. Right now, I just don't feel having one type of light is at the most benefit to the plants. No plant receives the same color spectrum and the same temperature of light every day, all day long and never at the same degree/angle. The dawn and dusk of days are cooler temps, east/west angles. The midday light is higher temperatures and fuller sun from a northern angle. Shade, clouds, rain, and weather in general affect the sunlight that gets distributed to the plants. How all of this affects photosynthesis and the photosythesis period I do not know. 

I am beginning to think that cycling my lights with two 6700K lights and 10000K on alternating days for the midday lights is what I will be setting out to do. I want to have a lower temperature light for the remainder of the hours. That is where the LED lights come in. I just need to make sure whatever lights I use will work with the plants photosynthesis period. And then if changing the light angles is something of benefit I will use spot/shop lights with grow bulbs or something to provide the random bursts throughout the day.


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## !shadow! (Jan 25, 2010)

Hoppy is a very knowledgeable person and we are lucky to have him in this forum but we must remember he isn't here to do our homework for us either.... or is he?:icon_mrgr. There are a lot of variables to take into consideration when dealing with led's, more than i'd ever expect to deal with for a piece of equipment in this aquarium hobby. l personally like 6500-6700k and 10k the best for my set-ups. The 6500-6700k bring out a very nice jungle green look to the tank and the 10k's a blueish white tint to it but nothing like acticnics. Check out my journal where l actually took pictures to show you what l mean
http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/t...04158-shadows-48g-gla-91l-rimless-tank-6.html
Last pictures clearly show what I mean. Before I tore down my tank I was using only 2 out of the 4 bulbs which were the 6700k's and the low light plants all grew healthy almost to the point where l couldn't keep up with the moss trimmings. This is referring to t5's tho.. Now on my 2.5g dry start with hc(dwarf baby tears) it's doing fantastic with 8k led's from ecoxotic. All lush and green and couldn't be happier. Anyways I wish you luck on your project


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## Hoppy (Dec 24, 2005)

To answer some of your questions:
LED light is like any light, once it leaves the LED, it is just light. Light loses intensity proportional to the square of the distance from the source, as long as you are a distance comparable to the size of the source from the source - a foot or so from a 2-4 foot fluorescent tube, a much smaller distance from a LED. When light enters the water, it is diffracted towards the vertical - if it enters at 45 degrees from vertical, it is diffracted to more like 30 degrees from the vertical. This tends to "focus" the light, increasing the intensity. Water doesn't significantly reduce the intensity of the light by absorption, until it goes more than 2 feet through the water. Light entering the top of the tank is reflected off the glass walls of the tank back into the water, increasing the intensity near the glass.

It is PAR, photosynthetically active radiation, that determines how effective a light is at growing plants. A 10,000K bulb and a 5000K bulb, giving the same PAR, will grow plants about equally well.


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## trackhazard (Aug 24, 2006)

OP, I want to say that I think you are overthinking this way too much. I am unsure why you would want to have such a wide variety of lights. The fact remains that if you want to grow some nice plants, you don't need to make things overly complicated.

Just to address a couple of things I've seen in your post:

Re Kelvin vs PAR - PAR is king. Kelvin just tells you what the light will look like to your eyes. You'd typically want a full spectrum "daylight" bulb with light in the red and blue ranges (photosynthetic peaks in the red and blue spectrums) and typically, these types of bulbs fall within the 5500K - 10000K ranges. This will give you a bulb that will produce light that is in the warm to crisp white ranges and will generally be pleasing to the eye as well as providing usable light.

The key here is "usable". Humans use light to the extent that it lights up the dark. Also, it should provide a viewing color that we are comfortable with (CRI = Color Rendering Index which describes a lights ability to reproduce colors in reference to natural light). Plants, on the other hand do not use light in this way. They use light as an energy source to drive photosynthesis. CRI has no meaning for them so for plants, PAR (Phosynthetically Active Radiation) is the key. Unfortunately, PAR and CRI/Kelvin aren't always in sync with each other. For example, many horticulturists use only red and blue lights to grow their plants as each triggers a specific response in the plants growth patterns (red light triggers flowering, blue light triggers vegetative growth). You could do the same in your tank at home but I doubt that anyone here would want a tank lit only by red and blue lights only.

Ultimately, the key is to find a light temp that you are happy with. Then adjust your lights (usually by moving them up or down and taking PAR measurements, another reason why hanging lights are so great) to get the PAR values you want, typically around 30-40 μmol at the substrate level.

Another thing I see in your post is a desire to somehow replicate nature in your aquarium with the various types of light you see. One thing to remember is that while nature is awesome in many ways, its not necessarily perfect. Most of the plants we see in the wild don't even come close to the quality of the plants we see in many of our tanks as our tanks really do represent optimal conditions all the time. Temperature, water params, fertilization and lighting are all optimized solely for the needs of plants. The key is consistency for everything. If you would like to play around with the light settings because you enjoy the various caprices of nature, then more power to you. But your plants don't necessarily care either way.

Lastly, from what you are describing, what it seems like you want is a full LED fixture with an array of LEDs and a microprocessor to control them. It would be the easiest and cleanest way of doing what you wanted. Take a look at this Vertex Illumina light and its range of color temps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHo7LTgkbZ4

There is some demand for this kind of lighting control in the reef world. However, the same demand isn't there for the FW planted tank community as its not really so hard to do with the tools that we have. However, this wouldn't necessarily be impossible to do on a hobbyists scale using some thing like an Arduino or some other PLC and the appropriate LEDs. Crees are popular because they are quality and publish the specs on their products. With some of the lesser known/generic LED manufacturers, you don't always get the quality/consistency of performance and many will not release specs of their LEDS so you don't necessarily know what you are getting.

-Charlie


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## thelastlife (Feb 14, 2011)

I'm not necessarily out just for results. I'm more into the what if's right now. I know my tank will be a low light, low maintenance. I know I will grow Amazon swords, valls, anacharis, and crypts. From what I have read they will thrive in almost no light. How will some of the "higher" light plants thrive in my setting? The simple answer is they will not. But that is where the different lights, temps, and angles will come into play. Will they make any difference? In all liklihood it doesn't. I still have reading to do on photosynthesis. I need to get a better understanding as to how quick the photosynthesis process levels off and what effect light has on the photosynthesis process at that point. So, yes, I overthink.


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## trackhazard (Aug 24, 2006)

thelastlife said:


> I'm not necessarily out just for results. I'm more into the what if's right now. I know my tank will be a low light, low maintenance. I know I will grow Amazon swords, valls, anacharis, and crypts. From what I have read they will thrive in almost no light. How will some of the "higher" light plants thrive in my setting? The simple answer is they will not.


Simple answer but not necessarily true. The thing to remember is that for the most part, the amount of light you get in one area of the tank isn't uniform throughout the tank. 

This is a gross paraphrase of something I hear Hoppy (and plantbrain/Tom Barr) say a lot but we have enough technology nowadays to blast our tanks with light. The problem we face now is getting some of that light out of the tank to keep things manageable.

I just saw this thread on building a fairly simple DIY reef light. This gives you some idea of whats involved.

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1952442

Hoppy also has a pretty informative thread about building his LED array for one of his tanks on this forum. You might want to go take a look at that one too.

-Charlie


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## Hoppy (Dec 24, 2005)

thelastlife said:


> I know I will grow Amazon swords, valls, anacharis, and crypts. From what I have read they will thrive in almost no light. How will some of the "higher" light plants thrive in my setting? The simple answer is they will not.


The simple answer isn't necessarily true. You can grow just about any plant with low light if you also have good CO2 supplied to the plants. They just grow slowly, compared to how they grow with higher light and CO2. It is CO2 that largely determines what plants you can grow, far more than it is light.

A problem you may face is that virtually all full size sword plants will grow much too big for any aquarium when they get good fertilizing and CO2. (They quickly become monsters with high light and CO2.)


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