P.s DIY is exhilerating for me, i would really like to design a canopy and wire it myself! Also lights are interesting arn't there. It seems to be a very open topic to whats good and not, kinda like undergravel filters :p

Try ModularLED, they've got a website in the sponsorlist. It's DIY but without soldering... really customisable as well.

I'm not sure what other commercial fixtures could be recommended in the 300 and lower price range. The AI sol would fit your requirements but that's at $400ish plus the controller. It's what I'm saving for incidently.

Will do, i guess the question now is what should i look for in lighting? by this i mean because my tank is tall, how many lumens or total wattage should i be looking for..

I'll leave that one to the DIY experts,

Since the tank is tall I would think the better question you should be asking is about lenses for better penetration

by that essentially your saying the color?

Oh, sorry no.

Colour will be handled according to how many LED's of blue vs. white vs. other colours such as red and green you put on. lenses focus or spread out the light. For example with your tank you might want a narrower lense on some LED's to give you penetration but a wider lense on other individual LED's to facilitate colour blending

ok, so after a little research i think im going to use:

the 29 gal biocube kit, even though i don't have a cube!
added to the kit im going with 2 red and 1 green cree LED...

Does anyone know if the kit comes with the XP-E's or the XP-G's?

Careful with the reds and greens ideally these should be independently dimmable or choose very wisely. I have reds and greens in my fixture, to get the color I like I'm running about 4Ws of red and 3W of green with 100W of blue and 45W of white.

I'd stick with the Rblue, blue and cool whites for now in the 3W range. Then for reds and greens look into some lower power strips that can be easily added and dimmed. There are a lot of RGB style LED strips on the market right now, someone recently posted one from Ikea.

In terms of other lower priced options worth looking at:
Panorama Pro LED Modules
PAR38 LED bulbs
Vertex Illumilux II LED Fixture
AI Sol Nano

In terms of DIY you could get away with as little as 18W of LEDs and keep plenty corals under that amount of light in that tank. Personally I'd go with double that or more and stick with cheaper alternative LEDs. Take a look here for around $150 you can get everything you need minus wire and heat sink to have 3 channels of color (Royal blue, blue, cool white) at 7 LEDs per channel (63W total) and you'll have individual dimming control for each channel. Plus the drivers are PWM ready so if you add a controller later on or build one they will work with that as well. If you don't see something you want like the straight blue LEDs just ask, not everything is on the site.

They don't ship to can. But ill keep lookin round

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