Just out of curiousity, but why are you using red and green LED's? Red shouldn't only be used if you are growing plants. Not too sure why you would want green either...

I built my own DIY LED fixtures, I should probably make a thread too. I wish I knew how to weld, and made my own heat sinks.... I am jealose of your heatsink! The cheapest I could find was still expensive and not custom to my tank (heatsinksusa.com just in case anyone was curious.

I'm interested in the type of acrylic you're going to use. Hopefully we can get the same stuff in Edmonton:

16536 117th Avenue NW
Edmonton, Alberta T5M 3W2
Tel: 780-451-1650
Fax: 780-454-6025

In terms of acrylic don't dig too far into it. Use standard clear 1/8" cast acrylic sheet, it will not warp and will not remove any visible light worth mentioning (0.5% of visible light is removed per inch of thickness). There are difference classes of acrylic for removing UV light but LEDs don't emit UV and you can avoid it to be safe by not purchasing a special type of acrylic. Also optics are acrylic....

http://www.sdplastics.com/acryliteli...FUVtransTB.pdf

And most Rona's carry the 1/8" cast clear for a good price.

I was in Ocean Creations in Calgary a while back and they have a tank that has some LED T5 bulb over it, including a green and red. The guy working showed me the difference with them on vs. off and the colors where out of this world. Mine will be both on separate channels so I can dim them right down to 5 - 10% if I need to.

That what I was thinking as well to use the cast acrylic vs. the extruded. I can get it at Totem as well but will check our local Rona to see if there price is better.

So I read through I think like 40 pages of the RC LED aesthetics thread and it seems to me that if you just where to go with a mix of Natural white, Cool White and Royal blues you would get much better color out of your fixtures. Lots of people warned against just adding a few spread out red and greens as you wouldn't get good colour mixing and would get kind of a disco effect.

Looking at your design I would be a bit worried about the "disco" light effect from the red and greens.

I would love to see what the end result of your build is. Personally I may swape out 50% of my cool whites for natural whites if I'm not happy with my Cool white and Royal blue mix.

I have a combination of a few reds, greens and yellows spread out. I don't use optics and there is absolutely no disco/spotlight effect.

Could it be the optics that give them the disco affect?

Probably, if the optics concentrate the light to a focused beam. With a wide spread I think the red and green would just blend in. The echotech lights have red and green and I haven't heard anyone complain about a disco effect with them.

yes optics can cause disco effects but also running the reds at a high current and having them too spread out. if I were going to include red leds I would make sure I put them on a dimmable driver for sure.

On the RC thread two people said that they wouldn't bother with the red led's but would just use natural white led's.

I guess everyone has their own opinion. I personally want to keep the number of channels of light down to minimum simplicity. but I still would love to see what your tank looks like I'm your new lighting. and maybe some pictures of you playing around w:ith the levels.

I have a Profilux controller and have several channels to utilize but in the end if I don't like them there easy to change & Martin is right here in Red Deer so I can get a different color.

I hope to build the mounting rack soon, get it all wired & fire these bad boys up.