Srusso and I were just talking about you the other day. I haven't seen much posted on your "morgan" pipe version lately. Care to update that thread and post some pics, pros, cons?
Srusso and I were just talking about you the other day. I haven't seen much posted on your "morgan" pipe version lately. Care to update that thread and post some pics, pros, cons?
It still works great. Not much to update on that part. The flow is perfect and consistent. The original black trash bag light blocker is still going after something like 6 months.
The tank, on the other hand, is a disaster. I cut the scrubber in half to an 8x10 screen and redid the LEDs, but they were too strong and I succeeded in burning out my entire screen except for the very edges. I've got a huge cyano bloom that has taken over, my nitrates are at 5ppm and my phosphates are at .15. I've backed off the hours on the LEDs, but I'm pretty much starting from scratch with the screen. Even though it is two years old, there is not a spec of algae left on it after an outer one inch rim because of the month I let it go with too much light for too many hours. I just got too busy to pay attention and now I'm suffering for it.
I built the scrubber for spotter on RC, the eshine one, and he had all kinds of issues getting the middle to grow in. I recut his slot pipe for him and that helped (used the wrong kerf blade to cut the original one) but he had to knock the hours way down, and run each fixture staggered, and split the photoperiod up throughout the day, and it finally greened up. He also lost a lot of livestock due to some unrelated issues and is still not feeding as much, but what you describe is overexposure, definitely. I added diffusers to the L2 but then needed to put a black dot on them with a sharpie over the blue to knock down the intensity until the screen ramped up.
So you definitely go "too far" with LED intensity.
I have 16 x 3W 660s and 9 x 1W 455s per side on an 8x10 screen. That pretty much toasted it. Center is bright white. It was a mature, well producing screen before that, roughly two years old. Even going just 8 hours is too much. I turned off the blue and turned down the reds to roughly 450mA.
Well 80 / 16 = 5 (that's one red per each 4x4 area) and 80/4 = 20 (one per 2x2) so you're right in the middle of those with the red and it should have been OK, but then your 9 blues is overpowering it, those are much more intense. I would only put 2 of those on that screen, maybe 3, and if you went over that I would run them at half power of the rest of the reds. 9 is just super-overkill. What you could do is leave them as they are and run the blues in 3 parallel strings within the series.
What I mean is that you would make 3 series strings of 3 blues, then wire the positives of each string to each other, and the negatives to each other, and insert those in the string. Each string of 3 LEDs would act as a current divider and therefore each string would get 1/3 of the total current. So if you were driving your LEDs at 700mA, each blue string would get only 233mA. That's as long as each string is electronically matched for voltage drop, or at least pretty close.
The blues are only 1W, versus the reds being 3W, and I was only sending them 300mA on a separate driver. So I had 9W blue and 48W of red. The ratio is not bad, but the overall power was certainly too much. That much power would be right if it was CFL. Unfortunately the blue driver wasn't dimmable so I just turned them off until I can find a lower power driver.
Anyway, I took that scrubber off line and am trying a single-sided 8x10 waterfall design right now. Same screen but just one of the lights, running the 660s at 450mA with the blues off.
Actually then those 1W blues would be just fine as they are I would think.
That's what I thought, but apparently not...
Maybe just too much overall power? Did you try a full diffuser?
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