[jeffkrol]

My 2 cents.

LED lights are unnecessarily expensive these days. I'm making my own lights and it's going to cost about $30-40 for two rows of 8 foot lights that you can customize. You can buy 16' LED light strips off amazon for like $15. That'd give you four rows of 4 feet LEDs for $15. You wont beat that price anywhere.

I also have a few cheap LED bars I got from ebay that work great. I purchased a 48" Full Spectrum LED bar for about $40ish bucks. Make sure they're half watt LEDs because the .1 watts are worthless. For highlight, you might need 2 of them, but for medium light tanks one is more than enough.

good luck.

Good idea.. Only catch is you have to add at least $25 for a TIMER/programmer for those strips..
and if you go RGBW in 5630smd or other 1/2W leds you need to find a compatible roll (will be more than $15) or 4 rolls, one of each color...
Of course you ca ndo 1/2W for white and .1w for RGB..

 

[jeffkrol]

$20.40 for 100 3W 6500k star LEDS..
USE 90

Salvaged computer power supply.. free

Salvaged aluminum..

30- 2.2Ohm 5w resistors (over-speced) $15. (3 diodes in series, 1 resistor, 30 "sets" in parallel..)
JUST a really strong "ribbon"....

$35 and you now have a 300W LED....

Add timer $10....and wire...



CUT diode count down to 72 and you can use this w/ 4 channels of LED's 18 diodes per channel"
http://www.dx.com/p/tc420-1-4-led-p...-black-12-24v-140cm-cable-269307#.VsdzGlJCCtM

The wizard says: In solution 0:

each 2.2 ohm resistor dissipates 1078 mW
the wizard thinks the power dissipated in your resistors is a concern Help
together, all resistors dissipate 25872 mW
together, the diodes dissipate 176400 mW
total power dissipated by the array is 202272 mW
the array draws current of 16800 mA from the source

split the diodes into 10000k and 3000k and you get full sunset/sunrise and an average k of 6500.........
"Real" diode watts is 176 and w/ an average of say 60 lumens/watt = 10,560 lumens

more than one way to skin a catfish...