10 gallon AIO rock wall

[BlueAbyss]

Originally Posted by karazy

blueabyss, how do you plan on making these so called "pendants"?
and where are you buying all your LED supplies from?

so i think i might end up doing the whole "super DIY" like the people on nanoreef have been doing with the heat sink and LED drivers,ect.

and guys, please remember im not going for super high power metal halide type lights. I just want to keep zoas,rics, and some of the easier LPS.

oops, i guess i shud change my title. im using a 10 gallon

Hmm okay, a couple things.

I'll be ordering the LEDs premounted on star boards from www.ledsupply.com... a US company but the only place I've seen that sells this sort of thing online. They actually sell everything I'll need but some of the stuff I'll be using will come from Canada (heatsink, fan, power supply).

I'm planning on growing SPS in 8" of water... my planned array (there will be 3 of them) is 1 - Cree MC-E chip (6.5K) with 4 Cree XR-E Royal Blue chips (~460 nm)... I'll end up with about a 14 - 20K look though this will be adjustable. And the PAR should be more than sufficient for SPS since the water is only 8" deep and the lights will be 1/2" or so from the water surface.

I should note that there will definitely be some spotlighting within the tank. I've planned for this since the goal is to light 'islands' of rock rather than evenly light the whole sandbed, and I think the effect will be cool. This will also leave lower light areas for things like zoas and ricordea, but the focus is keeping (and growing) SPS.

So I guess it all depends on what you want and what you need it to do. For your purposes I would say a 1 - 1 ratio of XR-E cool whites to royal blues would more than do it, and would likely penetrate to the bottom of a 10 gallon without optics (lenses). But it will be expensive if you are planning on lighting the whole tank with this... for localized high intensity light it's fine, but for anything else it's expensive.

The LEDs you have will be fine for general viewing purposes but will likely not produce enough light to grow even zoas unless the zoas are right beneath them in less than a couple inches of water. I would consider using them along with a higher intensity light source... if you're still set on LEDs it can be done modularly. I'll explain more about my idea later, I gotta go to work