I'm looking for solutions to a unique idea I want to try in the near future.
I want to intermittently light a tank to simulate sunlight coming through gaps in the trees. I was also thinking LED's because I like the idea of sunrise/sunset. I have a couple of basic related questions that I don't believe were answered in the stickies and FAQs (though i could be wrong). Some background on the planned setup: standard 65 gallon (36" long, 18 wide, 25 high) with a few inches of substrate, heavy wood hardscape, lightly planted with swords and perhaps other amazonian low light plants. Lights will be at minimum 25 inches from substrate, I'm alright hanging them a little higher, but I feel like that would lessen the effect I'm after.
I guess the first question, has anybody ever seen this done? Or tried it? Do you think it is possible to have enough light in the lit areas for plants without having too much light (I don't want to battle algae forever, small skirmishes are ok, but not full blown war)? My idea would be to have enough spillover to gently light the "dark areas" such that if a fish is over there, I can at least see them, but still be very dimly lit. I feel like this could give a really cool natural effect, and the plants would actively try and grow towards the light spots, giving a great focal flow (in my head anyway)
I would also like (as I said) to have appropriate sunrise/sunset capabilities. Furthermore, I like to be able to see into my tank almost whenever I am around. Many of the dimming timers I have found only allow for a half hour dimming period (according to the specs I could find anyway, maybe I have been misled). Ideally I would like more like 3 or 4 hours of ramp up, a few hours of full bright, and 3 or 4 hours of ramp down. I figured I could play with the full bright period until I got the timing just right for the plants to be happy. If i had more than one light bar and/or pendant, I could offset the light cycles to achieve longer light period without over cooking.
Is there a lower limit of cost effectiveness for DIY? I ask because a while back i did some research into DIY tanks, and its not really cost effective until you get to really big tanks (over 300gallons or something). I was wondering if there was a similar curve. DIY would be cool as I can make a weird mixture of light bar and spot light that would suit my strange needs. But if you turn around and say "but hey, stpeter, there is this light that is fully programmable, you could make it work by doing this ______, and is $200 cheaper than it would cost to make your own!" than it doesn't make sense to make my own. The other thing I've noticed is that price doesn't necessarily scale with light bar length (a 36inch bar is rarely 3 times more than a 12 inch for example.) so buying 2 or 3 bars to get this effect would not be as cost effective as a spot lamp. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding a dimable/programmable spot lamp, and secondly, I feel like a spot lamp might be too much light to pull this off.
Whats the most cost effective fully programmable set up that you can think of? I like many of the options out there, but they all seem to be missing just a little something. They either are missing the option of adding a controller, or they play nicely with this controller but not that one. And most of the controllers I've looked into are both way more expensive and way more capability than I need, I only want to run lights, as I plan on this being a "low tech" setup which means the lighting system becomes less price friendly (and it seems like to me that the more cost effective lights like to play with the more expensive controllers and vice versa)
Thanks everybody, I'm looking forward to your unique solutions to this idea (a problem that doesn't really need to exist in the first place!)
