Reef Bright and Rapid LED discussions.

[DonaldMcL]

Just looking for a little bit of information before I jump in on the group buy for Rapid LEDs.

I still don't have a tank yet, but looking at a 4ft option. Trying to figure out how many LEDs I'd actually need. Thinking 12 per foot of tank? Would that be a good rule of thumb? Also.. like many of the "fancy" LED fixtures, could these be hooked up to a controller of some sort and produce various lighting effects? Sunrise/Sunset/Moon moving across the sky, etc?

LED really seems to be the way to go, and I'm really looking forward to finally getting a tank up and running, but I'd rather by "right" the time time, as opposed to regretting it a few months down the road.

Cheers,
Donald

[KrazieCanuck]

I did a build thread on here for an LED fixture on my 90g tank.  (http://ovas.ca/index.php?topic=47094.0)  Have a look at it and ask any questions if you like.  I did 1 to 1 for Cool White (CW) and Royal Blues (RB) and just adjusted my intensity of each accordingly until i liked the color that was produced.  I actually run it with 10% Cool White and the color of the corals still POP big time.

I used 92 LEDs for the main lights (12 on each PWM Driver)  The CW LED drivers are then connected to one of my PWM outputs on my controller and the RB LED Drivers are connected to a different output so that I can tune each independently.

Using the controller I have it setup to ramp up the LEDs over a 2 hour period for Sunrise and then ramp them down over 2 hours for sunset.  I have also added 6 additional RB LEDs in parallel for my moonlights and set my controller to follow a calculated lunar cycle.  (No moon up to full moon and back)

So to answer your question, yes it can be done. 

As far as having it "move" across the sky, it could potentially be done, but I'll be honest, you would be looking at a LOT of configuration and calculations to do so.  the controller I have is "Open source" meaning I have the ability to fully program everything it does.  To accomplish a "moving" sun i would have had to program each of my 8 Meanwell drivers independently based on time of day.  Also, my wiring configuration of the LEDs that each driver controls would have had to be much different since you cannot control an individual LED but rather the bank of LEDs on each driver.  Also, my controller does not support 8 PWM outputs, not sure if any do actually.

Anyways, I recommend the LED lighting.  I have seen EXCELLENT results with my new build and yes the inital costs were high, but I'm now using 200+ less watts for a much brighter system.