Today I decided to add some DIY LED accent lights. Because of the open concept and suspended pendant it is very difficult to add actinic bulbs without legs on the aquarium or hanging two separate fixtures which would clutter the space. I decided to look for some blue LEDs that could somewhat replicate the function of Actinic fluorescents.
I almost bought Current USA's LED strip light but decided to visit the Auto Accent aisle of Canadian Tire before doing do.
This is what I found and came up with:
These car accent LEDs add-ons have two one watt LEDs per unit and are meant to connect directly to the 12V battery lines in any car. (Why anyone would want these lights anywhere near their car is beyond me)
With a little basic electrical wiring the 8 LEDS could be connected to a 12v DC adaptor from The Source
I gathered some tools took down my existing pendant and went to work.
The LEDs come with strong two sided adhesive meant to stick the lights to the underside of a car or in the glove compartment etc. I stuck these directly on the metal of the Pendant but as this pendant gets quite hot when on I may have to reglue the lights with contact cement. We will see.
Once attached, the wires were run under the reflector in the pendant in the same manner the existing wires for the halide bulb were attached. Each led unit has its own +/- wire so I ran all four lines through the light out the back vent and connected them all together with their respective lines at the end. In this case four + lines from each light were twisted together and four - lines from each light twisted together.
Once all four positives and all four negatives were bunched together they were all connected to a single +/- wire which ran to the adaptor.
Again only time will tell if these wires withstand the heat inside the pendant. They should be fine as they are only touching the backside of the reflective aluminum and are several inches away from the actual bulb.
The adaptor is a AC-DC Converter that has a switch to choose the Voltage output. The transformer was switched to 12v / 300mA output which is perfect to run all four units a total of 8 LEDs
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Once each electrical splice was secured and sealed with electrical tape I plugged it in and was pleased to see all four corners of the pendant now glowing blue.
As long as you know a tiny bit about wiring and transformers this upgrade is easy to do and is worth it. It definitely isn't as bright as a fluorescent bulb but it looks like it is factory built and adds a bit more color to the tank. I have these LEDS come one one hour before the Halide bulb kicks in and turn off 1 hour after it turns off. You could also use these as moonlights.
The entire upgrade (lights and transformer) cost me $55 CAN as opposed to the $99+tax I would have spent on a clunky LED strip light. A light I would have had to hang somehow polluting the aesthetics of my rimless setup. I think the Current USA ones are definitely brighter than these so it isn't a 100 percent replacement, but for something like a moonlight or dim actinics for those of you who just have pendants this is a perfect fix You could also add several more bulbs as they have tubes, strips, squares etc of leds. Cant say I would ever put something like this on my car but they work great in this case.