My Led's
So I was poking thru my thread and realized I didnt do a writeup on my LED's. Shame on me. SOOOOOOOO.....
This past december I lucked into the purchase of a used set of LED's. they were configured for a 4' long tank but the price was right. the kit was basically 4 strings of 12 non dimmable and 4 strings of dimmable. It was a mess with lenses falling off, some blown LED's and well...it looked like this:
SO, being I had a 6' long tank and really wanted to make this work, it needed some help, so I split it apart in the middle and made two similar sides to it.
Once they were split, I had to add in some more LED's, replace some so we ended up with 4 non dimmable strings and 6 dimmable strings. total of ~120 Led's of various colors. there are a few different blues, some yellow and some white. varied different lenses too. it is truly a Hodge podge of LED's but it works. Overall it is about 14000 kelvin in color temp. the two sides are a little different with the left end of the tank being more white than the right.
being I had two doors on the hood, I wanted to be able to easily remove them so we mounted each fixture on two heavy duty drawer rails. this allows me to pull them out from the canopy for cleaning. If you will notice, I also added a thin piece of plexi to act as a splash guard. it also doubles as a channel for the air to move thru to keep the LED's cool. I am Extremely happy with the drawers of lights. they are super easy to slide out for cleaning and I can fully remove them for maintenance without ever having to pull the hood.
I bought these Pulls. they were very flush so I could get the lights way up off the water surface and woudl pull straight out.
Shop Hickory Hardware Drawer Slide at Lowes.com
The T-5 fixtures were left in the tank just in case I felt I needed additonal light, but as of today, I only run the dimmables at a max of 80% and the non dimmables only run for approx 4 hours a day.
