LED lighting

 

It appears that LED Christmas lights connect directly in parallel to 110 AC. Is this correct

 

I have removed the lamps from their holders and connected them as several bundles of 8 LED's with the two opposite sets of leads crimped in butt end connectors waiting to be hooked up to power.

Input welcomed.

 

This is a ~3 gal tall hex tank with a small footprint. The light fixture holds just one screw in bulb. Unfortunately the light I am seeking does not exist in the twist PC bulb industry and is certainly not available in the cheap incandescent aquarium bulbs. I am looking for the effect that I get when using 2 UVL Super Actinics with one Actinic White/plant grow tube. As you can see from my new avatar, even the expensive plant grow LED's are too red for our liking and the products available to the reef hobby are still trying to duplicate the blue-white color wash-out effect that has been too prevalent for too long.

 

Real lighting option is the evil LED spotlight, $120 but only 20 watts and good par output,

posted it on JHAMB's thread.

 

 

LED's are generally connected in series for single strings and then strings are connected in parallel. Check out this site http://www.ledsupply.com/. It is a good starting point for learning about wiring up your own LED's and how they work. Additionally the Lighting forum on Nano-Reef.com has lots of good information.

 

LED Christmas lights are a little different. There are full strands of LED's that are permanently secured to their wiring and then there are retrofit bulbs that can be simply screwed into a standard C7 or C9 light string. These retrofit bulbs have the controlling circuit integrated into each bulb so a driver is not required. The retrofit bulbs are probably the easiest to experiment with because you can simply screw them into the appropriate socket and attach them to mains power.

 

If you do a search for LED Wall Washers you will find LED fixtures that use Red Blue and Green LED's and a DMX controller to create any of 16 million colors of light. They can be incredibly bright. I used a similar fixture with White Only LED's to light a wall on the outside of our medical clinic. The 40 Watt fixture brightly lights a semi-circular wall 45' tall.

 

If I were going to experiment with different colored LED's simply for night time illumination of a small tank I would just pick up a standard C7 Christmas Light String and buy several retrofit bulbs from a place like environmentallights.com. You can get them in White, Warm White, Green, Blue, Red, and Amber. Just cut down the string of lights to the number of bulbs you want to use and then attach the bulbs in whatever combination you wish.

 

If you are serious about making a real LED fixture then you will need to buy a heat sink, some high power LED's a driver or buck puck, then figure out how much current you will be needing to power your LED's and create the proper circuit. It's a little more complicated than just wiring them up in series and plugging them in.

 

I am getting ready to build an LED fixture for my Clown tank using Cree XR-E LED's, a 5" x 16" Heat Sink and a Meanwell ELN-60-48D AC dimming driver. I was considering only using white and blue LED's but putting them on different circuits so I can adjust the intensity of the whites and blues independently. I'll be retrofitting the fixture into a 20" Coarlife fixture. After seeing the difference adding red and green spectrum lights can make I am now considering adding some of them as well but this will add to the cost of the fixture because I want to drive each color independently which means I will have to buy a Meanwell driver for each circuit.

 

Well thats probably more than you wanted to know about setting up LED's. When I first started looking into building a fixture I thought it would be simple as wiring a few together but have found that its a lot more complicated than that especially if you want to have independent control of each color.