Ok, I thought by Al you may have meant AI as in Aqua Illumination, a heatsink from the company that makes LED fixtures which you used in making your DIY. So how thick or heavy are these bars? Some photos, dimensions etc. would certainly help me visualize what you're talking about. The new heatsinks I have are advertised to work without the need for fans as well and they've been doing the job on the center row of lights for a couple of weeks now. So if I were to consider what you're proposing/using, I'd need more info. Where did you get them?

Progress with the Lid
 

Here's what I've come up with for a cover. Mostly built, but need to fine tune, stain, cut vent holes, trim the edges & figure out the hanging scenario. The existing brackets for hanging don't protrude far enough through the new top. I suppose I could hang it from the top itself, but then I'd need to bolt the top to the frame & I'd rather have the top easily removable, so just resting on the frame. I'll figure something out.

Ended up getting a sheet of 1/8 mahogany plywood & fastening that to the end pieces. Amazing how stiff 1/8 ply can be when you're trying to bend it. I had to make two more semi arcs to support the plywood & make it bend properly in the center.

https://ojcrhq.dm2304.livefilestore....06e.JPG?psid=1

https://ojcrhq.dm2302.livefilestore....11e.JPG?psid=1

https://ojcrhq.dm2303.livefilestore....08e.JPG?psid=1

https://ojcrhq.dm2301.livefilestore....14e.JPG?psid=1

Nice job Mike. I like that look a lot! Do you have to drill for fans still on top?

looking good

Nice job Mike. I actually kind of like the 3 ribs on top. :)
FYI, when you have to wrap a curve like that, see if your supplier carries wiggle wood. It's a 1/4" plywood, but all the layers are oriented the same direction so it can roll up to something like a 4" diameter circle. Extremely useful, and you don't end up with those little curling edges that are always trying to straighten them selves like regular ply does.

Some progress on the cover and replacing outer rails of lights with larger heatsinks, sans fans. Heatsinks are mounted on larger 1 inch aluminum u-tube than when I did the center one, so more material to draw away heat. The center rail has been running fine without fans & the 3/4 inch u-tube for some time now, no issues with the LEDs, so not sure whether I'll redo that one with the 1 inch material. Still need to yank the old rails & mount the LEDs on the new ones, but lights are on at the moment. Might get it done tonight.

Came up with some artistry to vent the cover. A bit of work with all the drilling, but I think it should look & be pretty cool once I have it stained & mounted.

https://ojcrhq.dm2303.livefilestore....08e.JPG?psid=1

https://ojcrhq.dm1.livefilestore.com...04e.JPG?psid=1

wow nice
You are not only into electronics, but an artist as well
Well done

That looks sweet Mike, Nice work!

Nicely Done!

Thank you for the encouragement everyone! It's most welcome. I was up until past midnight yesterday replacing those two stupid outer rails of LEDs. Another few hours this morning hooking the wires back up.

The cover does have some flaws, a few cracks & tears from drilling the larger holes & stresses from bending. Don't show up in the photos! Nice thing about wood is that I should be able to patch it up & once the stain is on, will be harder to see the booboos. Will take a few more days until I finish it up. It certainly will be nice to have the mess of wiring covered up. I've read more than the odd post where folks tend to shy away from DIY fixtures due to the industrial look of the end product. Next build will probably involve a canopy, so it won't matter!

Electrical & instrumentation was my trade in the Air Force. I've taken on a few woodworking projects over the years since I enjoy that as a hobby. I work on my old 'yota & motorbikes too. I tend to take forever to finish stuff though.

Time for another update, this time due to a boo boo. Really should have seen this one coming, but kind of let it slide.

Been running the center rail with 4 whites & 5 blues on two dimmers. This means at full power of 1 amp per LED, the white dimmer would need to handle 4 amps & the blue dimmer 5 amps. Well within their rating & since I've got the voltage around 8 to 8.5 (a volt or two below the recommended voltage of 9 to 10), there's an added safety buffer with respect to current. So why would I run the both outer rails on only 2 dimmers? There are 5 Royal Blue & 4 10000K White LEDs on each outer rail. This means the RB dimmer handles a total of 8 LEDs & the 10000K dimmer deals with 10. If I were to run the RBs & 10000K LEDs at full power (0.9 amp for RB & 1.0 amp for 10000K), the RB dimmer would be at maximum rated current & the White would actually be over the limit by 2 amps. Clearly I know better, but I guess since I had the voltage down at 5 volts for the first year of running the LEDs, I kind of got complacent.

I recently replaced the 2 power supplies with slightly larger ones, my rationale being that with the extra power, the supplies should run cooler & safer. Not sure if this had anything to do with cooking the RB dimmer, but it wasn't long after this change that I noticed the RBs were very dim. I played around with the dimmer control & the LEDs hardly changed, just flickered. Photo tells the story, this is what a cooked dimmer looks like. The parts at the top of the photo are from a second dimmer that I patched in after finding the first one cooked. It started smoking a few minutes after I hooked it up. Might be able to save that one with a new MOSFET. What puzzles me is why the RB dimmer went & not the 10000K. After all it's running 2 more LEDs & it continues to soldier on with no sign of overheating. I have 5 dimmers on order & will be adding two to split the load & correct my faux pas. In the meantime, the tank's been looking a little whiter without the Royal Blues doing their thing for the last week or so. Livestock seems ok with it, but I'm anxious to get the RBs back on line.

https://ojcrhq.dm2301.livefilestore....36e.JPG?psid=1

Thanks for the heads up on the "wiggle wood". I'd never heard of that. Too late in the game for me now to rebuild the top, but certainly will keep my eye out for that stuff for future projects. I had also considered veneer, but that's pretty thin & actually quite costly compared to a piece of 1/8 " plywood. You can probably see the 'waves' along the bottom edge of the cover in the photos where the standard plywood didn't co-operate. I'll have to apply something along there to straighten it out, perhaps some gold coloured aluminum trim. The thing is starting to get heavy now though, with the larger heatsinks & cover.

Took longer than I had hoped to get the additional dimmers I needed after cooking the one that was overloaded with too many 10 watt LEDs. They finally arrived yesterday & I've wired them in so each of the 3 LED rails now has 2 dimmers controlling the mix of white & bue. Previously I had 2 dimmers on the center rail, but only a single dimmer for each outer. Should have fixed that long ago, but let it slide until there was smoke. Bad idea.

At the moment the center rail has fired up & I'm still waiting for the outers to kick in which won't be for a few more hours. Once they're on, I'll adjust & take voltage/current readings. Everything should now be well within the 8 amp limit for each dimmer, even when I crank the voltage to near max. Vf for the LEDs.

This is how it was:

https://ojcrhq.bl3301.livefilestore....95e.JPG?psid=1

Here's the latest config. with larger power supplies & 2 more dimmers:

https://ojcrhq.dm2301.livefilestore....34e.JPG?psid=1

I've dispensed with the voltmeters since I wasn't really using them for daily monitoring. Since I don't have a controller & simply use timers to run the lighting schedule, I'll dial in a voltage, check that & current with my multimeter & see how things go with the livestock for a while. It appears nothing suffered too much during the past month with none of the Royal Blues running, so I'll just play it safe for a while & keep things running at a Vf that's comfortably below the max Vf for the LEDs.

Nice Job...

I would change a few things though...
1.- Dimmers are a catch 22 - Loss of voltage as well as current limiting. You need to find a better solution as this is already getting complex and will impact the life of LED's and could be a potential fire hazard.

2.- Running LED's in series still means the same amperage draw just need more voltage. Ex.: 4 5v drawing 500mA each in series will require 20V @ 500mA but in parallel it would be 5v @ 2A. High draw situations the heat is generated.
The LED's im planning to use are rated for 9-12V at 900mA but will run 4 per string ( for a combined maximum voltage of 48V. This means one 48V 10A power supply can drive about 40x 10W LED arrays at 95% load.

3.- Move to a larger heat sink, loose the fans and gain back your hearing LOL

4.- Start looking at an light controller, whetever its off the shelf or Arduino based. This would allow you to recreate solar and lunar cycles and being able to fade in and out and recreate more other weather related events ( Ex: storms ). There's Tons of PWM controlled LED drivers that are fair priced, and readily available.

All this ends up reducing heat output, you'll end up extending the life of the LED, makes the system more stable and easier to use/maintain most of all

Thanks for the input. Not sure how much of the thread you've read, some of the posts are quite long. The fixture's been running fine since April 2012 except for the one mishap which I kind of had coming by overloading one of the dimmers. I have added larger heat sinks & ditched the original smaller ones with fans. I don't want a light controller beyond the dimming controls that I'm using already. Don't see how adding a controller or rewiring to series will make my life simpler. It would mean buying new power supplies/drivers & rewiring the works! If I do another build, I will probably use a few of the larger watt LEDs with optics. Don't foresee any major modifications in the current fixture, it's working fine for me as is. Maybe good info for some one else who's embarking on a new build!

No worries.
I will be soon posting a build log for my setup.
This will have a whole bunch of custom PCB's and multichannel controller / drivers...

Mike

Do you get any noise from those power supplies?

Mine made a bit of noise ramping up and down at first, now after a year they are much worse. Feel like modifying them with my hammer. Just curious if yours were the same at half or less power.

One of my power supplies has a built in fan, so that is audible, but normal. Other than that, they don't produce any noise. Solid state, so there really should be no noise, other than a transformer hum, but the transformers in these are fairly small, so shouldn't be audible.

Cool, looking forward to a new build thread. Hasn't been much on the radar here of late. With the price of commercial fixtures continuing to drop, the DIY LED spirit is waning!

In a couple of days this DIY fixture will have 3 years under its belt! Despite it being a parallel set up & all the 10 watt LEDs purchased off shore, there have been no failures to date. I've made several of modifications since April 2012, but essentially it's been doing its thing trouble free (after I added several additional dimmers to handle the load). I think it's safe to say this rig now owes me nothing. No bulb changes for 3 years, I haven't done the math, but if I was still running my MH/T5HO combo, there definitely would have been a few $$$s spent renewing them.

I will likely remove the supplementary 5050 RGB lighting strips & replace them with more powerful warm spectrum 5630 strips. It's cool to play around with the RGB colours, but they tend to drift in spectrum & the 'white' light created when all 3 colours are on, is not really all that white. One strip appears greenish, the other more blue. They certainly haven't been as robust as the 10 watt multi chips & seem to keep changing spectrum on me. I have a couple of UV 10 watt LEDs that I considered adding, but the livestock I have at the moment seems fine with the lighting as is, so probably best to not mess with it & keep it simple.

Hey Mike,
Nice to hear yours is still up and running. I still haven't got my main build lit yet, lol. When I got my Evergrow light over my cube, I took down my DIY 18" fixture I built. It was my trial run for the 3 - 18" I'm putting up over my 210. I had a half dozen UV LED's (True Violets actually) but the lenses on them look like they're burnt. They aren't, but they've discoloured so bad, they look brown. Not sure how much light they even put out now never mind the spectrum.
Have you noticed anything on yours? Do yours have lenses on them?

No optics on any of my 10 watt multi chips. The 5050 RGB strips are the water proof flavour, with a flexible silicone type coating. Actually a good reminder for me to inspect the 10 watters & see if they need a wipe to get any salt accumulation off. The fixture is up high enough so that it's not a major issue, but a periodic cleaning is never a bad idea. The UV or Violet (don't recall the wavelength ATM) 10 watt chips have never been installed, I've only run them for a few minutes to test them. Only have a couple, so probably wouldn't have much effect over my tank.

4 years now, going strong. No bulbs added to the landfill.

5 years + now on this puppy! I think I can safely say I've recouped my investment compared to replacing T5HO tubes or MH bulbs over that period. Might be time to look at changing out the LEDs, they may have lost some of their effectiveness over the years, but I have no way to tell really. Fish don't care & my montiporas are growing gangbusters.

Annual update of this dinosaur thread. 6 years running this fixture now and it may be time for a refit or upgrade. One of the LEDs finally failed a few months back & I replaced it since I have spares on hand. Another one went recently & several more are on the way out, losing a string of 3 on the chip. Seems the Royal Blue, Blue ones are failing before the Whites. No more spares on hand, so I'm faced with the decision to order more or do a major upgrade with newer multi colour multi chips available these days.

Wondering if it's even worthwhile, there has been so much progress in LED development & costs have come down substantially. Is anyone doing DIY LED fixtures anymore?? How are folks' commercial fixtures, Radions etc. holding up? Tempted to go to fewer higher wattage multi colour chips, but ordering more of the 10 watters & replacing them would be a lot easier than a redesign/build.

I had a 110 watt diy led fixture ran for 6 to 7 years no issues. Still running but not currently using because the colour array not great, royal blues and white only (50/50). Would be good for fish only

The first Maxspect I bought ran for about 2 years before the fans went and several of the led's burnt out. (lemon)

They gave me a credit and bought a new one been running for about 3.5 years no issues.

Have an ATI hybrid, runs great after 2 years.

Thx for the input/info.