No pics of anything real (atleast not anything interesting hahah) but here's a few new shots of my finalized models. I decided against the dual return lines and high volume return pump in favor of an eheim compact 1000 and a Koralia nano 240 for water movement. Still deciding if I will be building with glass or acrylic, but right now it's looking like it'll be acrylic. I've also designed the LED fixture and selected all the components for that build. After much debate, building a spreadsheet with realtime graphs showing the resulting spectrum from my various LED mixes I settled on the following LED's. Running at up to 900mA are 6x Cree XP-E Royal Blue, 1x Cree XP-E Blue, 1x Luxeon Cyan. Running at up to 1400mA are 2x Cree XP-G Neutral Whites. The blue channel and the white will be on dimmable drivers so I can adjust the balance, but my calculations show I should be where I want to be with both running pretty much full out. I may end up trading two of the RB's for regular Blue, so I'll order a couple extra and play with them over my current tank to see what I prefer. I would have much rather used equal parts Cool White and Warm White instead of the neutrals, but over such a small tank I'd get too much rainbow shadow effect with all those colors so I had to compromise with the neutral whites. If I end up building an LED fixture for the 70gal I will be doing the CW and WW and may add violet in there as well. That will make for a pretty smooth output spectrum like a traditional MH spectrum.
I've got the return pump, koralia, heater, and all the plumbing parts. Next big purchase is the glass / acrylic and then I will be able to start cycling, hopefully in mid Feb. I use the term "cycling" loosely as the sand and live rock will all be pulled from my 2 year old reef tank at home, so it'll be pretty much ready to go from the moment it's filled and settled. In march will be the LED fixture build, and April will be the DA RKL controller.
Enjoy the pics!
01-11-2012, 01:06 AM
Linear Mode
