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Thread: Lighting the Dump Bucket

  1. #11
    herring_fish's Avatar
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    Back to Florecents

    Ok let's talk about fluorescents until my research is done and LED's come to the top of my purchase list. What is the trade of between commodity lighting and more sophisticated versions? I already have a good electronic ballast that is ready to go but it looks like buying more of the cheaper bulbs might be a good idea if you are doing it every 3 months. The cost difference isn't huge but it is a factor and convenience is also something that I am considering.

    Not reading the text and just looking at the pictures, I see that some people are doing well with 4 CFL's. They are probably using high wattage versions. Some are probably doing just fine using average wattages.

    I feed several cubes of food per day and dose phyto paste ...and add powders. So there aren't too many people that have been down this path and most of them use skimmers. I am hoping to do what most people would consider over scrubbing. I used to have 4 old style VHO's on one side and it worked great. I tried that coral rubble refugium, without the scrubber but now I am disconnecting it and going back the scrubber.
    With the VHO's, I could feed ANYTHING! I even had to add fish emulsion fertilizer when I wasn't feeding enough because of the over scrubbing. Sounds crazy right? Given enough light, that algae did what every I ask it to do. Now I want to fire up the scrubber again and when I look at the frequent purchasing of bulbs, I want to go down the right path.

    Again, I am weighing fancy lighting that I buy at the reef store at full price or on line, paying shipping. I guess that would give me the best system outside of LED's. The other choice would be to buy a lot more CFL's as they go on sale in the Lowes or Ace stores that I go into a few times each weekend.

    Using a good reflector, do I go with 4 VHO's, 4 T5's, 4 to 6 55-68W CFLs or 10 or 12 23W CFLS ...?

    What are your thoughts?

  2. #12
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    Hey herring welcome back - one of the first posters on the RC thread!!

    Just to let you know, you did kind of invite all the comments

    Please comment on any parts of this thread.
    LOL

    But I welcome the information you provide based on your experience. I, as many others on here, have zippo experience in horizontal scrubbers.

    That being said, your original question is regarding lighting. Here is roughly how I figure it. I have to work this backwards into my 'area of knowledge' to figure your lighting up right...

    You have 252 sq in of material. If this were a vertical scrubber, it would 126 sq in single sided, or 63 sq in double-sided. For vertical double sided you would want then 30W on each side, or a total of 60W. For single sided, 60W on one side. For horiztonal, 1.5x the light or 90W. At least that is what the "basics" are currently at. IMO, you want to match the total surface area by 0.5W/sq in no matter what. So for 252 sq in you would want a minimum of 125W of total lighting.

    That being said, more is better to a point, but I would think it esp true with horizontal. So if you go with the double-light standard (which is 2x the recommended amount of light and 1/2 the photoperiod) then you would want 1W/sq in total surface area or 250W of total lighting.

    As far as the source of light, since your screen is only 6" wide and you want to drive the light to that area most efficiently, use the CFL floodlights, don't use spiral CFLs. The round reflectors you need will spread the light out too far and a lot of it won't get captured on the screen. You could use them if you oriented them sideways, and put a reflector over the top to push the light from the back and sides around and down, but I think it would be a lot of work and not much benefit over the CFL floodlights. With the floods to get better coverage your $ would be better spent throwing in a few extra lamps and staggering them off the centerline by about 1" each way.

    So I hope that helps to answer your original question!

    Also, if you are not 'up for' DIY LEDs, then you could always re-use the sockets for the CFL floods and just get some of the LED grow lamps that screw into the same socket. They're expensive ($40/ea) but you could replace one or two at a time and over the course of a year be fully converted. I roughed out a DIY LED fixture for this and using 3W reds and heat sinks would probably run you about $300 so that would definitely be the way I would go for LED.

  3. #13
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    Flashing is well studied for both algae growth and separately for coral growth. Alternating light intensity stimulates photosynthesis, respiration and growth in both. It was found that more intense flashes followed by an equal amounts of relatively lower light is more effective than a contain amount of light. This was studied with both waves and with flashing lights. The prismatic spectral shift of waves gives more variety of the light’s K value as well. Being able to eat steak all the time is good but you do need to eat your vegetables as well.
    Very interesting. One could make a case for building a DIY LED array on a dimmable driver and connecting it to a controller and ramping the intensity up and down constantly. Uh oh. I feel the mad scientist in me stirring.

  4. #14
    herring_fish's Avatar
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    LOL
    You had better definitely Google it and read up on the details on flashing. It's been a long time since I read those papers. Yes, they did try flashing light but I don't know what kind. I'm think'en that some of that came before good LEDs.

    Yes you're right. I did ask for comment on anything but I qualified it by saying that That decision was already made. I guess that there was some confusion that perhaps my ATS was not getting rid of the phosphates while it was the bacterial sump that I was disconnecting. I sure didn't think that the responce would be to through my design in the trash.

    As you know, even though I chose a different design, I have defended your design and SM's many, many, many times over on RC.

    Anyway, THANK YOU VERY MUCH for the warm welcome! Also thanks for your thoughts on the lighting question. That was exactly what I was looking for, even if you are dead wrong. But seriously folks, I was definitely kidding there .

    Actually, I had read your similar input in another thread and I am glad that you have expanded on it. That was part of why I started this post. I hadn't really thought about that before. I guess that I should have.

    Perhaps you have done some research. Maybe not. In any case, you have given this a lot of thought and you are saving me some time. So what you are saying is that no matter how good that reflector is, you will get a loss. I agree. Now I have to factor in that inefficiency. Darn! What percent would you think that is lost by light being block by the tube in a set up like this?


  5. #15
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    Well you're going to lose quite a bit between the individual lamps, that the problem. CFLs throw most of their light sideways, and only about 10% forward. So making one big reflector to house all of them will only re-direct the light for the ones that have line-of-sight to the reflector, the other lamp-to-lamp areas are mostly lost.

    To maximize efficiency when using spiral CFLs you need to reflect each one individually with a cone or bowl-shaped reflector when vertically oriented, or line them up end-to-end horizontally oriented with one long half-tube type reflector. For the latter you could probably do this and have 2 half-tubes, the trick is that you don't really want the reflector to be circular, more of a partial ellipse or a hyperbola as a half-tube (like an acrylic tube cut in half lengthwise) will just reflect the light back into the lamp. If you only have a 6" wide area to cover, you should be able to do this with one string of CFLs and a 6" wide reflector.

    The other option is to have the screw ends of the lamps pointing on the X axis of your drawing and have a bunch of elliptical reflectors, you would get better light density this way. I still think CFL floodlights are the way to go though because they 'drive' the light better and are applicable for a narrow screen, plus the lamp itself is protected with the floodlight enclosure so you don't have to worry about cleaning the spiral part or breakage contamination, and you can leave them open-air on top to let heat escape easier. You lose a slight amount of efficiency but this is greatly offset. Cost is a bit more but I think overall it's the best solution for what you're wanting to accomplish

  6. #16
    herring_fish's Avatar
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    I forgot to ask about how much are they? Typically

    23 Watts are about $9.20 for 5" diameter?

  7. #17
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    Yeah that sounds about right. If you figure in the expense of a reflector material (the flexible kind like SM sells) and the time you spend making it all work, spending $90 for 10 of these initially makes sense, but when you get to the fact that you have to replace them every 3-6 months, going with the bare spirals at 1/4 the cost starts to make more sense. If you are planning to use this setup for long-term, then no matter which way you cut it, LED beats them all out, and you can just seal-coat the LEDs with LED Seal. Since the fixture will be above the tray, you can put lenses on the LEDs and drive those down and get much better intensity and you won't have to worry about a shield so much.

    That said, most 660s like the Epistar, Osrams, etc aren't very friendly to using lenses. This is why RapidLED is changing from Osrams to Oslons, which can take a lens. Oslons are made by the same German manufacturer as Osram and supposedly will cost a little less ($4.50 vs $5.50 each). But if you're going for initial cost, Epistars from SatisLED or FEDY or e-bay will be < $2/each but can't take lenses, at least not in the 'standard' way.

  8. #18
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    I will have to look on the net to see what you are talking about (thanks) but before I read your last post, I was re-reading this:
    You have 252 sq in of material. If this were a vertical scrubber, it would 126 sq in single sided, or 63 sq in double-sided. For vertical double sided you would want then 30W on each side, or a total of 60W. For single sided, 60W on one side. For horiztonal, 1.5x the light or 90W. At least that is what the "basics" are currently at. IMO, you want to match the total surface area by 0.5W/sq in no matter what. So for 252 sq in you would want a minimum of 125W of total lighting.
    Wow, I have been out of your lines of discussion too long. I don't want to sound stupid but I didn't follow the whole thing. I think that you made some logical steps that I wasn't around for the long version of so I couldn't follow.[
    These are a few real questions. They are not rhetorical or snippy questions that I use to make a point. Setting aside for a moment the fact that some designs are a little or a lot more effective than others so you might have to change the amount of total growable screen, up or down a few inches to get the same results.....

    Are you saying that, no matter what the design is, normally you want to put 1/2 of a watt on every side of every inch that you are going to use? 1/2 watt for one inch of a one sided screen and a full watt on one inch of a two sided design? So you should get double the filtering for each square inch of 2 sided screen and if you go with one side designs you need to double the screen? That is what I always figured. Do I have it right? If so I mainly agree. if not, Im confused.

    I got lost on the horizontal stuff. Does a horizontal scrubber need 378 watts for a single sided design and 189 for a double sided design?

    At the beginning, how did you go from 252 inches to 126 so quickly and then cut it in half again for 2 sided? I thought that you would need 126 inches for 2 sided screen and 126 watts for both sides. ...or 252 inches of screen for one sided and 126 watts for that one sides screen. Yes? No? Sorry for all of the questions. I have a lot to catch up one when it coems to lighting.

  9. #19
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    I know it's easy to get confused between surface area and dimensional so we usually speak in terms of dimensional, single sided and horizontal hose up the terminology.

    Standard guidelines for a vertical double-sided screen are 1 watt total lighting per sq in of dimensional material. So a 10 x 10 screen is 100 sq in (dimensionally, but 200 sq in surface) and needs 100W total lighting, which is 50W per side. Technically if you look at it from a watt per sq in surface area, that's 0.5 w/sq in.

    Standard guideline for a single sided scrubber of the same filtration capacity (it's not really but that's splitting hairs) is 2x the size with all of the light on one side. So 10 x 20 (200 sq in surface) with 100W on one side, which is still 0.5W/sq in surface area.

    Standard guideline for horizontal is to double the screen size again and 1.5x the wattage. So 20x20 or 10x40 (400 sq in surface) with 150W which is 0.375 W/sq in so that's why I say bump that up to 200W, which is double the light.

    So for 42 x 6 which is 252 sq in you would want 126W to achieve 0.5 w/sq in surface area to meet what I consider the minimum lighting levels. Jump that to 1.0 w/sq in and now you're at the "high light" standard where you can run the lights 1/2 the time (9 hours) as long as all the light is captured on the screen. However it is not well known how well this works on a horizontal scrubber.

    does that make more sense?

  10. #20
    herring_fish's Avatar
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    Yes sire. Thanks a lot!

    I'll go to raining now and then I will read up on the LED stuff that you wrote and I will probably have more question.

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