LED/T5 DIY Hybrid

zach_discus · Aug 4, 2014

So my fience gave me the go ahead on doing a large scale reef after the wedding and honeymoon at the end of the month. Tank is a standard 6ft 180g. I really want to do a LED/T5 Hybrid set-up. This is what I'm thinking is 4 Lumia 5.2 70w pucks (CREE Lumia 5.2 - 70w Full Spectrum 5 Channel CREE LED - LEDGroupBuy.com) and 4 4ft T5 and maybe a Ice Cap 660. I'm a machinist by trade and already have a nice 5'x1.5'x3" slab of alum I can machine what ever I need to out of it :).

I would like to have dimming controls over the 5.2 and just have the T5s as my noon day blast. Any and all suggestions welcome.

Almonds · Aug 4, 2014

That's pretty awesome. I have two Lumia 5.1's for my 75 gal tank hooked up to a storm controller. Its quite nice to have the sunrises and sunsets in which you can have certain channels fade out sooner than the rest. The controller also enables lunar cycles, thunderstorms, clouds, setting lat/long for the sunrise/sunset, and such. For your case, maybe a strom-x controller would be better due to it allowing more channels (16 compared to the regular 6) working the the cloud channel clustering (??), and also a lot more dimming levels (4096 compared to 256). For mine, I took two Meanwell Coralux driver boards, with their respective drivers, (one per Lumia) and soldered the CH1 wires to each other between controller and the Meanwell. You can see what I mean by looking between the Boards and the Controller sorta. This is kinda a really short sum up of what I did (don't know if ya needed this sort of stuff but hope it helps). Here is the Storm controller manual/instructions. The instructions are kinda lacking but it is easy enough to learn.