# DIY LED lighting for a tall tank? help



## bigcell3000 (Aug 4, 2005)

Hi guys, I'm having trouble lighting my aquarium. Its a 30'' by 30'' 30'' cube tank. Right now i have two 250 watt metal halides hanging from my ceiling. I run one for half the day and the other one for the other half. the reason why I do this is because running both turns my room into a sauna. lol. I was thinking about doing LED lighting (for obvious temperature reasons) but i was worried about the distance to the bottom of my tank, which is a carpet of dwarf four leaf clovers. does anyone have any suggestions? I would like to build the light myself.


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## niko (Jan 28, 2004)

Private message TropTrea. More help than you can dream of.


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## Tanan (Mar 11, 2009)

Cree XTEs and Cree XPEs with 60-90 degree lens will give you a very very good coverage.


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## TropTrea (Jan 10, 2014)

considering you want your lights atr least 6" above the water surface and your tank is 30" tall i would look at the 40 degree lens on XP-G2 LED's. 

For an even light distribution I would suggest you run 4 rails for the 30" so your LED's are only about 6" apart. Run the LED's with a 5" spacing on the rails 2 1/2" from the edge. This will give you a total of 24 LED's. 60 Watts of total power may be enough depending on your plant selection so you want to run the LED's at 1040 ma that will actually give you roughly 2.9 watts each or nearly 70 watts total. If you decide you want to grow more light demanding plants in the future you can change the drivers up to 1500ma that would give you 5 watts each or 120 Watts total.


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## bigcell3000 (Aug 4, 2005)

TropTrea said:


> considering you want your lights atr least 6" above the water surface and your tank is 30" tall i would look at the 40 degree lens on XP-G2 LED's.
> 
> For an even light distribution I would suggest you run 4 rails for the 30" so your LED's are only about 6" apart. Run the LED's with a 5" spacing on the rails 2 1/2" from the edge. This will give you a total of 24 LED's. 60 Watts of total power may be enough depending on your plant selection so you want to run the LED's at 1040 ma that will actually give you roughly 2.9 watts each or nearly 70 watts total. If you decide you want to grow more light demanding plants in the future you can change the drivers up to 1500ma that would give you 5 watts each or 120 Watts total.


Thanks from the help. This is really useful information.

Sent from my 831C using Tapatalk


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