Ace's ATS v2.0 - LEDs

[oildalemonkey]

Hey Ace! Remember me from CCRK? Nice looking unit you have constructed: I hope it works well for you. I was curious how you handle water changes these day? Do you do them at all anymore?

Also, I just wanted to say thanks for getting me onto the ATS track a while back. Both my tanks are now ATS filtered, including one with an SM100-style unit I built myself. I don't see myself ever going back to the traditional filtering methods.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I just joined that site with your LED build thread so I could read it last night. Very nice! It also looks similar in LED selection to one I saw on RC, I can't seem to find it though. The build had very few CW/RB and had a mix of cyan, WW, NW, etc. I of course saw that thread after I had ordered 54 RBs and 18 CWs. So now I have to decide what to do!!!

[Ace25]

Hey Monkey.. ya I remember you.. I "moved on" to ccreefs, which you know who won't even allow anyone to speak of that site on his forum, go ahead and try and type it out and see what happens. LOL.. but anyway, good seeing you here and awesome that you made a SM100 scrubber. I am now in the process of making a SM25 type scrubber for my 29G tank. I think I will go with a CFL bulb on that one though like Santa Monica uses because it seems a little difficult to control heat on LEDs on that type of scrubber, but the design will work perfect on my 29G setup.

Floyd, thanks for the compliments.. I guess I should have updated that thread at the end to state that I went back to my original plan with the LEDs .. since it was my first build I made a few mistakes as you probably read, mainly on the voltage for the dimmer. Not knowing about that problem I replaced some neutral/warms with cools to get more PAR, but after I figured out that I was only running 2.5v out of 10v to the LEDs on the dimmer circuit I ended up putting the warms and neutral back on, but ended up with only 50% of the LEDs having 60 degree optics, the other 50% do not have any. I feel that combination of optics on my tank gives me more than enough PAR (1200+, not the 1800+ I was getting with optics on all of them, but still 3x what a Radium and Phoenix 250w bulbs put out). So it is still way overkill but I feel it gives me the perfect looking light for my preference. Perfect blending and good intensity. I currently run the neutral/warm whites and 40%, cool whites at 30%, Royal blues at 50%, and cool blue and cyans at 60%. I do not get any "windex" look from the cool blues like everyone told me I would get, nor do I have any issues with Cyans, although if I put optics on the Cyans it does give me ugly beams of cyan in the water, without optics it just fills in the missing color spectrum and in my opinion looks really nice and makes the green corals pop a little more.

I certainly won't claim to be an expert on LEDs but I have now played with quite a few of them and all kinds of combinations so I feel I can give advice to others if they want it. I also built a 84 LED "actinic" light for a friend that has 3 14" SolarTubes over his 240G to replace his T5HO actinics. He went with "china" LEDs and driver, driver died within 30 days like I thought it would, and china LEDs, while they have almost matching spectrum as Cree Royal blues, they are not built nearly as well and can barely handle 750mA. So I am not a fan of "cheap LEDs" after experimenting with them some. To me it is like buying a $10 MH bulb on Ebay vs a major brand bulb for $50-$100. The $10 bulb only lasts a month or 2 and the spectrum shifts very quickly on them. Just throwing that out there because I know quite a few people now are looking to save a $ on things. I would not recommend trying to save a $ on LEDs though by going with china LEDs. Save some $ by going with ledgroupbuy.com and get real Cree's for LEDs. As far as drivers... mean well's do work great, but they are certainly not the most efficient driver out there. The overhead on the driver is almost as much as the LEDs themselves, ie. 12x 3w LEDs should take 36w of power, with a mean well driver, it takes around 58w total, driver is not efficient at all and you can easily tell that by how hot they get. I have heard of a couple new ones just coming out that are supposedly much better than Mean wells, I am sure some people on RC and Nano-reef have talked about them, I just can't think of the brand off the top of my head right now.

[rygh]

Dang, wish I had heard of that ledgroupbuy before.
But I did get a pretty good deal from cutter, and they do bin sort.

I totally agree with the china-led choice. I bought some cheap warm white ones for my scrubber, and definitely regret it.

I may try Cyan on my main tank as well. I have RB/Blue/CW/NW/Red, but it still seems a bit lacking the the blue-green area.
The standard blue helps, but not quite enough.

[Ace25]

Couple pics

ATS v1 @ Day 4 using 42w 2700k CFLs from above (not ideal mounting, but they were literally 2" from the screen at the top, so very close but not directly facing the screen)


ATS v2 @ Day 4 using LEDs. Visually, in person, I would say I have about 2x as much "stuff" on the screen at day 4 with LEDs as I did with my CFL setup, again, I understand design plays a big role in it.

[Ace25]

Day 5 picture

[inkidu]

One thing about BioAlgae for fuels it is a freshwater algae they use from everything I have read, so it has slightly different requirements in lighting vs marine algae in my opinion.

I do believe the ideal spectrum for marine algae is going to be different than FW algae and really different than terrestrial plants due to the living environment that marine algae comes from. Anything more than a couple inches under saltwater gets a large majority of the red spectrum filtered out (90% at 12") so if algae grows in the ocean at depths deeper than 12", chances are it is not receiving much red light, unlike terrestrial plants. Looking at my tank now, I can say by the daily handfuls of algae I am pulling out lately, that LEDs will grow algae very well, much better than my T5s and MH ever did, unfortunately that wasn't what I wanted to grow, I was trying to grow corals. LOL. I do believe over the eons things like marine algae will adapt to their environment in order to utilize the light spectrum it receives as efficient as possible. So I think marine algae will not utilize the reds as much as a lot of people think it will. It will still use it, I just don't think the standard photosynthesis chart you see that pertains terrestrial plants are an accurate representation of what marine algae or corals will utilize most efficiently.

Please start a separate thread pertaining to these ideas. (I will not get tired of hearing it)

What obviously is needed is the implementation of ideas.
Thanks and good luck with the build.

I doubt that Rygh would mind if you added to the Modern Led Scrubber Light thread.
I have already taken that thread far off the original thread topic and he started a new thread pertaining to his build.

[SantaMonica]

Not bad LED growth for 5 days if it's a new screen.

[Ace25]

Yup, new screen.

Day 7 picture before cleaning.. didn't grow to much more past day 5, just started growing that brown slime stuff, which I got on my first ATS as well. I know that is completely normal on some setups, obviously mine, and after a couple weeks the brown slime goes away and algae starts to really take off. So I will post weekly updates before I clean the screen to show how it is filling in week to week. There was quite a bit of "stuff" that came off the screen when I cleaned it, much more than my first ATS during the first week, so that is a good sign I think.

[vicbay]

nice growth. any progress on the fan cooling?

im thinking of trying a long version like the sm100. but with leds ofcourse. was it just the 55g sump that dictated your screen kinda square? or flow concern with a wider screen?

how much were you feeding with your cfl scrubber? are you still feeding the same?