homemade LED lighting

[jness]

Recently started playing around with some easy plug and play LED strip components. Bought water tight acrylic enclosed LED strips.
Work on a 12V plug in transformer. Wired a white strip, a green (525nm) strip and a blue (470nm) strip together.
Connected wires to the 12v transformed , plug it in and voila,it works.
Going to use it to add additional lighting to areas of my 320 reef which is already lit by 3 Solaris I4 fixtures (yes they are working, had to redo thermal grease on many LED strips and change circuit boards on fixtures and replace power supplies) Will keep you updated.
Also experimenting with LED screw in bulbs running in regular sockets, bought some that are reported as 6500K. Also seem to work well at lighting in deep tank. Bulbs are pricey but no significant heat, we'll see how long they last and how well they perform.
Soft corals, LPS,SPS and clams all doing well growing like crazy with nothing but LED's for over 2 years...
Will try and upload some pictures of lighting system over tank ASAP

[Loverotties]

Love to see pics!Why do you have green lights?

[Dragonist]

[jness]

agreed
the pictures are now in my album

http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/album.php?u=28829

[lost1317]

Where did you get the strips?

[jness]

theledlight.com called Piranha light strips
should work OK for night lighting or with enough of them over a refugium or small nanoreef thats not too deep
Don't think they have enough output for deeper tanks

Using some over my refugium now, have algae and pulsing xenia in refugium

The LED bulbs however do seem to have great output

Someone could just string a whole bunch of these together for adequate lighting would probably still supplement with actinics though

some distributor sell T5 replacement bulbs that are LED at about 7000-9000K
work in fluorescent fixture

[Dragonist]

http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/album.php?u=28829

to make it a lil easier

[Dragonist]

1 of your pictures

[Staplesofficewar]

interested as well...are you familiar with what wavelengths of light your reef led lights emit? I have always wanted to custom build an led setup.

[jness]

most of the DIY LED sites list the speciific wavelenths of their LEDS
The blue piranha strips are 470nm
But for lighting a reef tank higher output LED bulbs are necessary

I'm currently playing around with 420-470 nm blue LED bulbs from LEDLIGHT.com,they have many varieties
Also have several high intensity Blues from HIDHUT.com, working on putting a custom diffused lens over those, they are currently over my 320 reef along with the Solaris's I have.

6500 K 12-15 W bulbs also available that give a very pleasing look in the tank.
...these aren't cheap bulbs but are fun to play with, and hey the chiller never runs now for over 2 years since I went all LED