LED bar rebuild help .

gilman · Apr 16, 2020

I have an Orphek Bar that blew up and I want to rebuild the board with new diodes . I need help with the diode wattage , type , where to buy etc ... I dont know what I would need to achieve the right amount of par and color spectrum

I want to use it for soft coral and LPS . I want to definitely have the color pop that Aquaillumination has in their fixtures . I think its a royal blue diode they have that brings out the heavy florescent colors in the zoa’s etc .
Pictures are the board and type of diode .

gilman · Apr 16, 2020

Pictures

Ratherbeflyen · Apr 16, 2020

I don't know anything about the Orphek. So I can't tell you what it came with or how to replicate it. However, I did build my own light.

It has 5 independently controllable channels. It has 10,000nm white, 460nm deep blue, 440nm blue, 420nm purple, and 390nm UV LED's. Each color is on it's own controllable channel that ramps up in the morning, has ~4 hours of peak intensity, and ramps down in the evening. I used 10 watt LED chips on board. I don't think there is any significant difference between using one 10 watt chip vs three 3 watt LED's. It was just easier to mount 44 chips instead of ~150 LED's. All of them were no name brand, bought on ebay directly from china.

in the interest of full disclosure I also run 4 80 watt T5 bulbs, but when the tank was new it was only running on LED's. It definately made enough par for LPS coral and sps coral did ok, but did better when I added the T5's. I can't tell you exactly why that is. Spectrum, PAR, florescent UV, some or all of that, I don't know.

Most likely your Orphek is using 3 watt LED's. How many and what color/spectrum is going to depend on the drivers or power supplies and how many channels they are on. IE, if that strip is one long 100v DC strip, and you can't control the spectrum of independent colors, then I would not recommend doing the same thing I did. The reason is my whites are only on for a few hours a day and at ~1/2 the intensity of the blue's. That's the advantage of having 5 colors that are independently controllable. If you have to run all them all at the same intensity, then I would probably only have 1 white for every 10 or 15 total LED's.

I tried to copy the color spectrum of the ATI blue plus bulb. It is a tried and tested blub and bulk reef supply #1 selling bulb. It definately has the most light in the ~440nm spectrum. I did it with a LED controller, but it can also be done by adding more blue than all the other colors. Again, I'm not sure how Orphek builds their lights.

My setup has been working pretty good for me, and I think you'll be fine for keeping LPS and soft coral with anything similar. That's probably not everything you need to know, but hopefully points you in the right direction.