# Here we go again...LED lighting again :-D



## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

Ignore the barrel distortion of the craptacular camera

(I offset it because of where the plants are in the tank)


















Comparison
12x700mA K2 (top) 1x13watt AH Delux (bottom)









2weeks









3.5 weeks









Little shimmer video. While it doesn't shimmer quite as well as a single point source (MH), it does shimmer (multiple point sources). Later I may try using less emmitters at a higher current.
http://webfiles.uci.edu/algomez/K2/P1010001.avi

*NOTE: while testing out the lights, I only run them at work to make sure there is no electrical/thermal issues (which there isn't thus far). ..so this tank has no light on the weekends!!!*


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## Blacksunshine (Aug 11, 2006)

For what reason did you chose these very high priced LEDs over the standard 2 prong bulb styles? 
I assume you have higher asperations then just making a moonlight out of them.


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

You probably don't know my history on LED lighting, but:

http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/...-lighting-via-luxeon-stars.html?highlight=LED

http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/do-it-yourself/12379-led-array.html?highlight=LED

I already had a pair of 17watt 700ma drivers and the emmitters were only ~ $3.50 ea.


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## dennis (Mar 1, 2004)

What exactly is a K2 emmitter?

.....what do you mean this can't be good? It should be great!


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

the K2 is the new generation of luxeon LEDs. Think of the III emitter, only better interms of efficiency, upperlimit current handling and their color is now 6700k on average instead of ~5k.

I hooked up 3 star III emitters to get a feel for things and it leaves me with high hopes for the 12xK2 that I'll be using.


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## dennis (Mar 1, 2004)

Do you know the lumen output and distribution? What sort of "spread" do they produce, in terms of surface coverage?


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

all the info you could want 
http://www.lumileds.com/pdfs/DS51.pdf


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## epicfish (Sep 11, 2006)

Hmm, interesting. Keep us posted on this project!


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## Blacksunshine (Aug 11, 2006)

WOW! Ok yes much better then moonlighting as I was thinking. Thanks for the link to the old thread. clears things right up! Very impressive work and research you've done on the subject.
Best of luck with this endevor. I have seen LED lighting systems like you are making offered by one company once.. Sadly I cannot remember what company it was but the whole array was quite expensive. IIRC more so then an equivilant PC set up. But the scale that these arrays were for large tanks 48" and 60" IIRC. based on the 11 bucks per even at the now price of 3 bucks per led I can see where the cost comes in. Much more feasable and cost effective on the nano and smaller tanks where only a few units are needed. 
I will deff be keeping an eye on this topic to see how things progress.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Tony, any guess as to the equivalence in watts for these vs. PC lights? I assume a lot less wattage would be needed since these have little waste heat.
And, of course, what is the wattage of each LED?


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

LEDs DO put out a lot of heat. That is a big falicy. The thing with LEds is they tend to seem very bright but are fucused compared to bulbs which emmitt in all directions

Here is the first step...12xK2's thermal-epoxied to some extra heatsink. I'll solder them up and hopefully wire up the powersupply tomorrow.


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## darkfury18 (Apr 28, 2006)

any progress on your project?
do you think one of those k2 luxeon star would be enough to light a 4" cube nano?


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

TEST PICTURES
Yes, these are crappy pictures, but I don't feel like re-shooting, so they will have to do.

Eventually (next week?) these will be retrofit into a fixture.

First impressions: BRIGHT!!
They light up the room quite well. No they are not as bright as the 2x13W AH setup, but they are close. It really is like a mini metal halide setup.

The photos below are taking with ALL camera settings the same, so you can use it for relative comparisons.

1x13watt AH (deluxe kit with reflectors)









2x13watt AH (deluxe kit with reflectors)









12x 700mA K2 emmitters (I might try driving at 1amp to see how bright they go)









Another fiew of the emmitters









Another fiew of the emmitters


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

This is a terrible photo for a tank shot (too low, off to the side, equipment in, floating plants, newly planted etc) LOL...but that is ok. THe intention is purely the lights.

Top= 12x700mA K2
Bottom=1x13watt Finnex (it has a really good reflector equivilent to the AHSupply kit)

Camera setting identical. Color is fairly accurate


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## Ibn (Oct 20, 2004)

Very promising so far.


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

Ignore the barrel distortion of the craptacular camera

(I offset it because of where the plants are in the tank)


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## ruki (Jul 4, 2006)

That does look like a mini metal halide light. They must get pretty hot since such a small area is putting out so much light. But on average this should be less than the total heat from a fluorescent tube to put out the same amount of light.

I took a look at the PDF file. Do you think the white LEDs needs some Red LEDs added for better plant growth?

If you have the success I think you will have, I might have to pull my soldering iron out of storage.


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

I had great success in growing plants with the original 1watt luxeon stars. No need for red LED supplimentation.


They do throw a bit of heat, but nothing that an underdriven (quite) old computer fan + heatsink couldn't handle.


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## dennis (Mar 1, 2004)

Cool beans! Hard to tell from photos but are you getting the MH type shimmer from the emitters?

Does this mean we'll have to start figuring ou thow many ma/gallon is necessary to grow plants?


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## onemyndseye (May 12, 2006)

Holly crap thats bright!!! I've been wanting to jump into these projects for awhile now...

I demand that yu cease posting these pictures at once before you make me have to spend more money!!! LOL

-Justin
One Mynds Eye


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## IUnknown (Feb 24, 2004)

Gomer,
You should bring these to the convention to show them off


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

I just may have to!

so far plants are pearling and really good growth


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## redstrat (Apr 3, 2006)

Very interesting... so how much is this whole setup running you just out of curriosity, if you dont mind me asking?


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

expenses are relative because when I decided to do this project, I already had everything except the actual LED and those set me back ~ $45. The whole project however is probably in the $100-120 range if I had to get everything from scratch.


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## schaadrak (Aug 18, 2006)

That looks awsome, great job.

Keep us updated on this, I'm very interested in how well these will work in the long run. When I was researching LED's the main problem I found people to have was the quality of the light as well as the intensity seemed to drop dramatically during the first six months or so. But none of those set-ups were the same type of LED you have, so it'll be nice if those were just quality issues with their brands.


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

pasted to first post.


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## dan2ktj (Mar 14, 2005)

Looks great Tony!

Who did you order the Luxeons from?

Thanks,
Dan


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

Future electronics

A warning to anyone contemplating doing a project like this. ...this isn't a plug and play project. very real concerns must be addressed with: isolation, thermal demands, and propermatching of LEDs to drivers.


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## gpimm (Sep 17, 2006)

Exellent work!

I going to have to try these out. I like the high intensity from a small emiter. Great lighting effects.

Yep, LED's put out lots of heat. For the folks that don't know how to figure out the heat load the calculaton is a simple Ohm's law calculation. Per LED the waste heat is voltage across the LED times the current through the LED. Voltage in volts, current in Amps. 

As an example, say that Gomer cranks up the LED's to 1amp. The power disapated using the typical voltage numbers from Phillips goes like this... 

3.72 volts time 1 amp for a power of 3.72 watts for each LED. As there 12 LED's in use the total power disapation is 3.72*12 or 44.6 watts. This is a lot of heat to get rid of. If the LED's are at the max voltage that Phillips specs, the total watts would be 1*4.95*12=59.4 watts.

Another angle to keep in mind is solid state devices need to be kept quite cool compared to other variations of light generators. The lower the maximum temp, the larger the thermal emiter (heat sink) needs to be to get rid of the heat. 

This much heat just about guarantees that a fan cooled hood will be nessasary.

Enough rambling for now.

Gary


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

http://webfiles.uci.edu/algomez/K2/P1010001.avi

even with a craptastic video recording on a camera, it does shimmer


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## gpimm (Sep 17, 2006)

Looks great!

Gary


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

If anyone is going to AGA, I'll be bringing them along


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## ruki (Jul 4, 2006)

Wish I was going to AGA so I could see it in person!


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

I brought them out on several occasions. Perhaps others can comment 

I can say that I had several people asking when I was going to be making them for the public LOL.


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## Justintoxicated (Oct 19, 2006)

hi I'm glad to see someone else who knows about Luxeon LED's.  I wanted to do this as well but going PC was so much easier/cheaper lol...

Just 2 things, though lots of testing and proven results, the K2's appear to not be as good as the origional Lux III's, they were over hyped and fell short...Since they are cheaper than Lux III though they would still work great for this project, they just take mroe power to reach equivilant brightness and Lux III (I don't care what the spec sheets say)... They definately consume more power to get the same light levels of a decent Bin Lux III, but yea you can drive them up to 1500ma. They were a big dissapointment on candlepowerforums.com...

That said I hope you isolated the slugs if running in parallel, since no Luxeons slugs are actualy Neutral. (-) yes, but not neutral and it can cause problems in the long run if they share teh same heatsink.

Finaly, I would suggest, if you find the time to play around with the New Cree's they are much better than the previous versions and are Obliverating Luxeons in terms out output and efficiency! here is a link.
CREE | XLamp LEDs, leading the revolution in lighting

Check out Candlepowerfourms.com in the LED subforum. Crees are near low powered HID in terms of efficiency! I was thinking about picking some up since there is a group buy but I doubt I will put them in an aquarium light fixture.


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

They are isolated and running at 700ma (since I have those drivers already). I am aware of the Crees definitely plan on doing this with them but ...well...need to save up more money


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## Justintoxicated (Oct 19, 2006)

Gomer said:


> They are isolated and running at 700ma (since I have those drivers already). I am aware of the Crees definitely plan on doing this with them but ...well...need to save up more money


Do you think the shimmer effect is worth the cost and effort? I may be able to pickup Cree's for $7.50 each if I act now. The only issue I can see having with them is they have a narrower viewing angle than the Luxeons. So I guess that would just require spreading them out a bit more.

Did you get the driver from future as well? Thats really the only thing holding me back...Driver Housing and reflector, heatsink and fixture lol...I can get the LED's already but could not think of anything to use them in. I wanted to make a Quad Cree LED Mag modded flashlight but the reflector selection is very limiting right now. So maybe this would be a better project? Then again I already have an aquarium light and it's alot easier to change colors with bulbs than LED's...

I was thinking the ultimate light would be a series of colored luxeons that would change color temperature with the light cycle. But the cost would be outrageous!


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

The shimmer is nifty. What I like is that I can pack a lot of light into a small fixture without the direct radiating heat of metal halides.


There is a guy offering the P3's at $6.75 each so I am thinking it over 

I got my drivers from future for about $15 a pop way back when.
I am thinking of doing a dual driver cree setup where the second driver (50/50 blues) is dimmable.


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## gnatster (Mar 6, 2004)

Here is an image of the unit.










Held over the winning Iron Aquascaping tank by the builder while the raffle winner takes a picture.


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## IUnknown (Feb 24, 2004)

Tony,
Check this out,
Reef Central Online Community - 5mm LED primary lighting for my nano reef


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## Jonesy (Jul 8, 2005)

Seoul Semiconductor just came out with some new LED products this month...their P4 series and the Acriche.

www.zled.com


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## Gomer (Feb 2, 2004)

I'd still go with the Cree Xr-E's.


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