# DIY LED clip on light for Nano tank



## Sean W. (Feb 2, 2014)

Hey guys,

So I am going to be setting up a little 3 gallon rimless nano tank here pretty quick. I want to keep it low tech, low maintenance and low light. I already have an idea of the plants and fish that I want to keep in it and I already have the tank, filter, heater, substrate and a good idea of what I want the hardscape to look like. So all I needed was a sleek looking LED clip on light that would give me the amount of light I need. So i went onto ebay and just typed in " Nano LED clip on " and came across a product that seemed to fit the bill of what I needed, for a measly $11 shipped, so I hit the buy it now button. 
I got the light in the mail today, first thing I want to go over this light really quickly. The packaging was hilarious, it was the light, in an unsealed box with a shopping lable on it. Zero styrofoam, zero packing of any kind,nothing, just the light in the box and thats it. Not to mention mine didnt come with a power supply, but I have a few extra power supplies laying around that are better than the one it would have come with anyway, so that didnt bother me too much. Plugged in the light and turned it on.... what a joke. This couldn't light up a glass of water let alone a fish tank of any kind. At about 12" from the bottom of the tank I was getting about 400 lumens with this light, divide that by 60 gets you a good estimate of PAR, that gives me about 6.6PAR, need a bit more than that. So this is the benchmark to beat, 400 lumens about about 6 PAR.
So I thought about returning it and pursuing a different solution, but the DIY'er in me said lets see what we can do with this little guy. It does have 3 things going for it, its sleek and small, fits on my aquarium perfectly and I really like the look of it. It has a pretty sweet little touch capacitive on/off switch which is kinda cool and it comes apart really easily and its super simple.
So I decided to remanufactured this thing to suit my needs.

Here is a couple pics of the product on the ebay page.



















lol this one cracks me up, it would be less than useless over a reef









The goal. Increase light output to about 1500 lumens at 12" to get about 25 PAR, while keeping the appearance of the fixture identical and maintaining functionality of the capacative touch on/off switch.
So first thing I do is remove the 6 screws to get the cover off and cut the wires going to the LED PCB, sorry dont have pics of this, I was in the zone and didnt think to take pictures and document what I was doing. 
With the cover and LEDs out, I took my dremel tool and made the opening as big as I could while keeping the holes for the screws, this way I can make as much room for LEDs as I can.



















the next thing to do is figure out which wires I need. There is one hot and two ground. This fixture had optional on/off blue LEDs that you controlled by tapping the power switch to get the desired combination of LEDs: white, white + blue or just blue. So i figured out which ground I needed by stripping all of them and trying them on a strip of LEDs I had laying around. Got that figured out, switch still works so full speed ahead!










With that figured out, I put the led cover back on to make sure it still fits and get an idea of the surface area im working with for LEDs.










So now im at a stopping point until I figure out what ebay LED strips im going to use. I was going to flip through Hoppys DIY LED strip light thread and see what he used and go from there.

but here is the fixture on the tank.


----------



## TropTrea (Jan 10, 2014)

Here is another thought. instead of changing the LED's change the power going through the LED's. It appears that you have 48 LED's but I do not see a power supply. So I can only assume it is running with 120 volt with the LEd's wired in series so your getting roughly a 2.5 Voltage drop across each LED on a 33% duty cycle with the positive pulse of the sine wave. Switching to a filtered DC power supply would increase the intensity considerably as they would on full for 100% of the duty cycle. 

Yes you have a black box as far as your LED's are concerned. But most LED's will run efficiently up to 3 Volts. Even though I strongly recommend a current supply rather than a voltage supply for LED's. 

Keep in mind that with efficient newer LED to obtain 200 lumns you only need 2 to 4 Watts of LED power. This can be done using only 2 of the newer LED's run on a 70ma power supply. I'm thinking the CREE XML, XPE XPG series of LED's.


----------



## Sean W. (Feb 2, 2014)

Alright! So i got it finished! Everything went relatively smooth, with only a few challenges I was able to overcome.

First thing I got the lights unpacked and cut the first strip and wired it up to the switch just to make sure they work right out of the box. Got them hooked up to the wires coming out of the fixture and turned them on using the touch capacitive switch and was really unimpressed with how bright they were, at 12" with just one strip, I was getting a measly 20 lumens. Just to make sure they were operating properly I stuck the wires directly into the wire coming from the power supply and was instantly blinded. So obviously the touch switch either has a bad connection or really impedes throughput, either way, I decided to remove it, but thats later on.

Knowing that the lights work properly I continued on!

First things first, I cut 3 strips of lights and prepared the solder points and wires.









After getting 3 strips wired I put them at 12" and measured their lumens. With 3 strips at 12" I was getting 900 lumens, In the ballpark of my goal, so I cut another strip and added it to the other 3 strips. Four strips got me up to 1200 lumens. I was aiming for 1500 lumens, but I simply could not figure out a way to get another LED in the housing, so 1200 lumens will have to work.










So, I mounted the 4 strips to the aluminum heatsink and got installed into the housing and soldered and heatshrunk the wires from the light array to the existing fixture wires.


















Next I bypassed the touch switch by removing the circuit board pictured and soldering the wires together. 









here you can see where I plug in the cable coming from the power supply









I had another power supply laying around that has an inline switch, decided to use this on instead.









And the final product! The color seems to be a bit more blue, closer to 8,000K than the advertised 6500K color.


----------



## mlongpre (Oct 10, 2012)

Pretty cool man! What lights did you end up getting from eBay? Looking to do something similar.


----------



## junglefowl (Nov 16, 2012)

Very nice job! I have the same fixture from ebay as well but never think I can replace the LED. I might have to look close to what you've done and DIY mine so I can use it for my 2.5gal low tech tank. Where do you get your LED strips and what kind?


----------



## TropTrea (Jan 10, 2014)

Interesting approach. Can I ask what the cost total came out to be? From what I'm seeing with LED's 1,200 lumns is a lot of light for a small 3 gallon tank. However the light spectrum of the LED's is a factor as well.


----------

