SmallFry's 75 Gallon (Reef Eventually) Build

[SmallFry]

Well, if you ever needed convincing that there are a million things that can seriously delay your build...

Things were all on track, I had my LEDs and all I needed to do was build the light, then this happened....









And as if that wasn't enough we bought this



which turned out to need a whole new subfloor and ended up like this...




Which has delayed things just a little.....
But finally I got around to building the light..





The LEDs have optics on them now too, but I don't have any photos of that, but they're quite bright. Speaking of the heatsinks, I built my own from a couple of different sizes of U channel bolted together. I drilled a lot of holes and filed them together with a rat-tail file to create slots for convective cooling. I did this to try and get the heatsinks to help cool themselves rather than having a big stagnant lump of hot air stuck on top that needs a fan to move it. It seems to work. I'm currently driving them at 700mA on the cool white and royal blues. The heatsinks are just warm with no fans running - the fixture is totally silent which sadly cannot be said for my return pump ..






On the plus side I now have the chance to get my 2 year old, but unused Euro-Reef RS100 going. Am impressed - there's no livestock, but it's still finding something to skim out. Not sure what though..

I've now got a couple of pounds of live rock in there to get things started and I'm dosing it with Stability to help get things established a little quicker.. I'm hoping to start moving some of the fish over from the 27 as soon as possible..