Holy crap Mark!! How did I miss this??? You're finally off the starting line!

GO MARK GO!!! :cheer2:

I really like the black silicone with the clear on the euro. That's slick. Beveled edges on a filter sock holder?? Now that's just bling!! :p

I'm happy you're finally getting the go on this project! Now, when's the house done?? :D

Well the house has been delayed over and over. I'm hoping that we'll see some movement in the next two weeks as the builder doesn't want things extending into the cold without having the exterior done. We were supposed to be going a long time ago so I got ahead of myself on the tanks...hehe. Got the best though:)

Are you back to Vernon to stay or just visiting? I will be in the new house by then so you are clear on the carrying part. If I'm not in the house...I'll probably be in the loony bin as I can't take any more delays!

Make sure you let me know you are here and you're welcome to come see whatever I have.

Gorgeous sump but wow that's a lot of baffles.:biggrin:

Well it's been a lot time since I updated this thread. It's not that I haven't wanted to...but as yet there has been little progress. Since things finally appear to be moving forward again...I wanted to bring it up to date.

After having the tank soooo long waiting on my delayed house, things finally started to move forward in April. Unfortunately, after only 2-3 weeks of construction we found out that a mistake on the lot survey put our basement a few inches too close to the setbacks. The city promptly halted our construction while they decided what to make us do. Here's a few pictures of how far we got.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1318181915
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1318181957

Since then, the city has chosen to sit on their decision and after heavy lobbying has finally indicated that they will make a decision on my variance request on October 27...5 months of waiting.

In the hopes that things will turn out positive (meaning I don't need to spend $40,000 to rip out the basement and start again)...I have started my DIY LED light.

Since the tank is 84L x 32W x 26H, I decided to go with a fixture that was 72Lx24W which should cover the area where I will have coral. My light will encompass 180 Cree LED's including a mix of Royal Blue, Cool White, Neutral White and some Blues as well. Here's a picture of my planned layout:
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1318139010

And here is what I've accomplished so far:
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1318182060

Well, I spent the weekend drilling 376 holes with a drill press...and I can say it would be too soon if I had to drill more.
Here's a shot of the cluster LED holes...marked to show which LED goes where. I will be using the BJB solderless connectors as I just don't have the time to do that soldering.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...0-10165856.jpg

The cluster of LED's is placed on a 4" U-channel with 2" sides...it's about 1/4" thick. The rest of the LED's are on 2" U-channel...about 1/8" thick.

I placed my order with cdiweb.com today for my 6 drivers...3 HLG-150h-48B's and 3 ELN-60-48D's. Both are 3 weeks out once ordered. I will be doing parallel strings on both the Cool whites and Royal blues.
Lastly I need to order my fuses, terminal blocks, wire and resistors and I should be good to finish of the LED build.

I missed your update Mark! It's lookin good! I can't believe you're having so many stalls getting your house built. Jeez... I hope they make an allowance for you.

Variance meeting with the city on Thursday. Hopefully they will recognize how much they've affected me in time and money already.

As far as progress on the light...decided on a plexy splash shield...now have to figure out how to mount the shield in a way that lets me easily remove it for cleaning without taking down the fixtures. Am also planning a power lift for the light so working on that without the house, canopy or tank up can be a challenge.

Well, I got a little farther on my LED light last night. With two kids, it's always a challenge to get over to my brother's workshop where I'm building this.

I am planning an automatic light lifter on this and I've been trying to find a way to put it all together. Finally found Stainless eye-hooks for the cabling. Got the Stainless Aircraft cable coming too. Will go into the light lifter later as I can't put it together until the house is together...it will be pretty rudimentary.

Here's a shot of the hooks.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1319645125

And that got me to the point where I could start mounting LED's. I've chosen to use the BJB connectors for ease of use and no soldering. Not the cheapest option but compared to the price of Vertex or Radions, everything I do seems low cost.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1319646616

Only got two rows done so far. Even with the BJB connectors, it's still a lot of planning and then re-checking everything you do. The LED's you see below are the XP-E Blues and the XP-G Neutral Whites.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1319646682

looking good Markus Maxamis:mrgreen:

Thanks...This thing is going to be a lot of work...but I'm sure they will be able to see me from Space when I turn it on. Crazy how much light they HO LED's give off.

Well today was a disaster. We had our variance meeting to discuss the couple of inches that our back corner was too close to the property line and after hearing from several hot headed neighbors, the city told us to start over.

Now I am left the monumental task of either ripping out the entire basement or finding a way to cut out the couple of inches we need. This sounds easy but I designed the house and everything was fit exactly the way it had to be...I had no excess anywhere. On top of that, we have no real access on the side that would need to be cut out...neighbor has put in a rock wall right there.

It's just not my day today.:cry:

Sorry to hear that sounds like a total nightmare :sad:

for 2 freaking inches??? WTF?? Geez that's terrible that people can't cut you some slack for 2 freaking inches!

Funny thing is we have huge setbacks compared to places like Calgary. Over 8' on each property...what is it in Calgary now 8' total?

I guess to be fair, it is only a couple of inches at the front of the house, but almost 5 at the back right corner.

Man that really sucks. Do you have any recourse with the survey company? We are facing that exact issue with out house right now, the surveyors were almost an entire foot off in height in the backyard so now the grade level retaining walls back there are all too high. We just got the letter from the city inspector last week, so I'm still crapping my pants a little.

Unfortunately, no recourse. The city approved the original developers plans and so they don't even want to talk about how they were not right. Part of this whole thing may be the city covering their butts for not double checking things in the beginning. The City of Vernon is pretty corrupt. My brother built a new house in an older neighborhood. There were no sidewalks at all on the street. The city said he had to build a side walk in front of his house only (can you imagine how stupid that would be) but could get out of it if he "gifted" them a couple grand. Corruption!

So, worked the evening until midnight on getting these little LED's down.

Progress was slow...

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...0-28210354.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...0-28231741.jpg

Hard to believe how many of these little buggers there are:

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...0-28231759.jpg

Glad to be starting the next phase of wiring. Still waiting on my two bigger fans and on the drivers. Will also be doing a moonlight setup on here too. I haven't yet made my order from digikey.ca on the resitors and fuses but will do that this weekend.

Oh no! This is terrible. :(

With neighbours like that I would be inclined to find a different neighbourhood to live in. I know you're a stand up guy that made an honest mistake (that technically wasn't even YOUR mistake), you're the kind of guy that makes a GOOD neighbour, those people don't deserve you in their neighbourhood. What a bunch of jack---es.:mad:

On the brighter side (har har) your LEDs are looking pretty sweet.

Is this a brand new neighborhood?

Well, time to add the lastest steps in my LED build.

One of the challenges of doing U-Channel was how to cool it (if it needed it). I don't know that I will require cooling but I've planned for it none the less. The clusters of LED's on the large 4" channel will build the most heat and so I've put double the fans in there.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-03212843.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-03212852.jpg

It was a real bugger to figure out how to attach the fans...finally found this PVC channel that I could cut down and screw to the aluminum to provide some real surface for the fans to screw down to. Not uber pretty...but no-one will see that part of the light anyways.

Then I had the challenge of not wanting too much noise. The 6 smaller channels are spread out so I only wanted one fan to cover each side group. Found this 22cm fan at Newegg...covers the whole area and will blow through the gaps to gently cool the area between the splash guard and the Lenses. These fans push over 100cfm and are dead silent.

You can vaguely see the fan here.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-03214749.jpg

All of the fans will be controlled by a 5 channel fan controller. My plans are to mount the separate drivers into a PC box as decent sized project boxes are hard to come by in Canada. This will allow me to mount the fan controller as well and it should look cool.

Tonight I will start to run the wiring between the LED's.

Too bad about the variance, I know what it's like as I had a similar issue with my house which ended up being over only 2cm! We ended up settling a deal with the neighbor to buy 2cm of land of them which fixed the issue... Not sure if that's an option for you but perhaps worth looking into.

Yeah, we've looked into it...but after the city kept us waiting over 6 months with a partial build, the neighbors are ****ed and won't entertain the discussion.

cash speaks louder than words, if purchasing the land will solve your issue a written offer could spike the neighbors interest if the price was right. For instance if it's really going to cost $40K to fix it then offering half that to the neighbor will save you money and time and there's no way the neighbor would turn that kind of offer down.

yeah, I was disappointed in the neighbor too. I've met them both and he seemed really nice...she instantly seemed difficult. I'm trying not to get too frustrated with them as I will have to live beside them for many years to come and our children are similar in age.

We have run into another problem related to getting space from the neighbor...the city has decided that we are a good example for demonstrating to other builders why it doesn't pay to make mistakes...they've already told us they would "kibosh" any attempts at subdivision to add sq. footage to my property from the neighbor. It's funny, the neighbor was mad because of the unfinished house for 6 months...which was because of the city...who then decided to prolong the problem by killing our variance request.

Wow that seems like total BS to me, unless they have reason to form a predigest decision on your builder I see no reason why they can legally prevent you from pursuing legal solutions. Actually never-mind, judging by the mess I went through it sounds about right although for me things seemed to be left more up to the inspectors than the county.

But on a second note if it's your builders fault then it's up to them to fix it, is it not? How are you responsible for their mistake?

Well, it comes down to this. Normally when a builder does a home for you...they have a good profit margin as well as an administrative fee built into the cost of the home. We had been waiting on my long time friend as a builder for years...but in the interim, we had 2 other builders quote on the job...When they give you per sq. foot costs...they are really really padding. When I wanted a breakdown from them...they had 25-40k in admin costs alone plus profit.
My builder and I worked out a cost plus program. I get every invoice for every single nail he uses...and I pay cost plus on that invoice. Labour hours are tracked at each guy's rate...and I pay cost plus on that as well. I have left him no room for any deviation and in this situation the city could be blamed for much of the problem. I just don't feel right in completely saying it's his cost to bear. I'm sure he will take much of it on, but I want to do the right thing. I've found that when someone is making nothing on a project...things don't go well...so part of my desire to assist is selfishly trying to make sure nothing else goes wrong or is poorly done.

IC, best of luck!

What controller and drivers are you using for your LEDs?

For drivers...I have a mix of ELN 60-48D and HLG150H-48B. I also have a moonlight driver for 4 little moonlights still to arrive. I have one inventronics driver as well that I'm not sure I will use yet.

As for controller..I was always planning on doing the APEX...but after seeing the Cerebra...I've been saving to get that bad boy. My conversations with Vertex indicate that it should be released soon and pricing should align with Profilux (expensive I know)

interesting combo, I like the phrase it will be released soon, don't hold your breath. What about the PWM module, how long for that? Shortly after soon I presume.

Actually I just wanted to make sure you're avoiding profilux and that whole PWM module POS. You might also want to consider a Arduino controller just for the LEDs, it's cheap enough to use as a stand alone controller for just the lights then you can add your dream control when it gets released (Although I'm guessing you're not in a rush these days). I found a guy that builds them to order to the specs you need for a reasonable price if you're interested. With the Arduino you can also add lots of features and controls to say control heat sink temp with the fans, after all you won't actually need full fan power all the time.

Thanks for the info...given my delays...I may have time to wait for the release...haha, is that the bright side of this mess?

I got a little more done last night so i thought I would make sure this gets updated.

My fan controller arrived. Nothing too special...this was made for pc fans. This one can be run without the PC motherboard with just direct power feeding it from a DC power source.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1320507920

Completed a diode test on all of the LED's with my multimeter and all were good.

I started wiring the lights. Now that I've done wiring on both a soldered fixture (my test fixture) and this bad boy with the BJB connectors....you have to be insane to solder. I keep waiting for the shoe to drop on what is bad about these but nothing so far has come to light.
Here's my progression:
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-04211558.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-04215229.jpg

And finally where I quit at midnight lastnight:
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-04232329.jpg

Well, a little time has passed since I last updated. I have been really busy so work on my light has gone slowly.

The good news is that despite the brutal treatment from the city on my house build...we figured out how to beat the building code and have done so without having to tear the basement out. What that means is that my house is once again under construction after 6 months of sitting there. Too bad now I have to pay extra to build in the winter.

Anyways, here's the pics...

Wiring of the main lights into their strings...done.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-17212401.jpg

Moonlights have also been added but I forgot to take a picture.

Here's the house showing some signs of life!

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-30154425.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-30154549.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...1-30154524.jpg

looking great, glad that things have been resolved. Are you and your neighbour square?

My favourite part was framing, things seem to go so fast at that point. Every day you go by, something major will have changed. Beats the electrical/HVAC/plumbing stage, where it can seem like whole weeks will go by without any noticeable changes.

LED looks good mang.....and that view is beautiful!

Thanks...we've been sitting on the lot since before there were any houses there in order to save some dough and pay as much as I could of the lot off. It should be good day when I can sit in my living room and look outside to that view and inside to the 7' tank view!:biggrin: Not sure which I will be looking at more.

The framing does go very fast and I agree that it's be best part since you really see progress. Today they should be putting in the floor joists and pouring concrete at our front door/walkway and rear deck.

I have steel beams coming in to support where the tank will be going as well as the front deck. Not sure when those arrive though.

Looking good buddy! Hopefully the weather will hold off until the concrete and roof are in place.

I think my neck is going to be sore the first couple of visits swinging it back and forth between the view of the tank to the view of the lake!