290G Peninsula Tank

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Hey Mike, thanks for the offer of help...I might take you up on that sometime. If you take a look early in my build...this DIY light uses some big drivers and I chose to do parallel strings so resistors and fuses were needed...and they worked well...I hope. Didn't end up fixing the light yet...there are still more than enough lights there to cook whatever is in the tank so I've delayed till the weekend.

I'll need to back in the thread to check out your LED build. My LEDs are hooked up in parallel as well, however not strings, rather single 10 watt multi-chip LEDs. I really should have fuses as well, but just haven't got 'round to it. I opted for 12 VDC power supplies rather than 'drivers', but am making sure the voltage I feed my LEDs is always less than the rated maximum vf, so underdriving. So far so good, the fixture is coming up on a full year of use in early April and haven't had a LED burn out yet. Only failures so far are several of the fans on the heatsinks. I have spares, so replacement is no problem & it takes all of 10 minutes. If I were to do another build using 10 watt multichips, I would use the larger heatsinks without fan now available and simply run a couple of bigger fans over the whole fixture. Probably would go with larger multichips with optics next time around as well. Three or four 50 to 100 watt multichips would be much simpler & less cluttered. They're fairly affordable these days & come in a good selection of spectrums, including multiple colours per chip.