Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Behold...LEDs!!!!!

This blog post is about retrofitting my Marineland Eclipse 12 lighting system. It sort of reads like a Vonnegut novel. The Eclipse comes with a 13W compact fluorescent bulb that looks like this:

It's clunky, it gets pretty hot, and it doesn't put out enough light. Here is what my nano reef looked like under 13 watts of blah:

So like many aquarists, I decided to retrofit! After a little research I opted for two Ecoxotic Panorama LED Modules. They're 12.5" long so they fit nicely inside my 18" hood. Each module contains eight 8,000K white lights, four 453nm actinic lights, and consumes only 13 watts of power while giving off a crapload of light. I paid about $85 per module over at PetSolutions. This price is about $10 cheaper than anywhere else on the web and they were on backorder for a week or two, but were delivered faster than expected and in pristine condition. To the mod!

First, I removed the old light module. It was surprisingly easy and involved only unscrewing a few simple screws:

I dried off the hood with a paper towel and noticed some plastic pegs that would hinder the placement of the LED modules. I "fixed" them with some pliers and elbow grease:

At this point, the cats started trying to smack the clownfish on the now-exposed surface of the water. The Nerf gun fixed that problem. Next, I lined up the modules in the hood and drilled holes for the screws:

I used neoprene washers to seal the screwholes, nylon nuts & bolts to avoid rust, and black plastic screw caps to hide the screwheads atop the aquarium. It all looked like this:

I attached the modules without much trouble, side-by-side, like this:

I plugged these into a power-strip attached to a timer switch to simulate daylight/nighttime. In reality, this approximates "Jesse wants to look at his fish" time / "Jesse is sleeping" time. I work from home, so the former is significantly longer than the latter. Anywho, the lights looked awesome, but within a day or two, one of them started flashing. I did a little Googling, and found an Ecoxotic troubleshooting page that said, essentially: "Attention idiot: Your lights are flashing because they're overheating. Unless you want your LED strips to overheat, don't install them so they're touching each other." I then discovered that Ecoxotic had kindly included mounting brackets with the retro kit, and these brackets nicely separated the LED strips by 1/2" so as to not overheat them. When doing the initial install I had seen these brackets, puzzled over them, and threw them in a box. I felt silly for doing this.

While I was installing the brackets (creating two superfluous holes in the Eclipse hood that I plugged with black plastic thingies) I decided to reinforce the hood with a metal brace from Home Depot. I did this because my aquarium doubles as a cat-warmer and I was concerned that Scout, in her chunkiness, might put undue stress on my fancy LED modules. The reinforcement looks like this:

The mounted LED strips look like this:

The top of the hood looks like this when the lid is open for feeding:

Ecoxotic promises that these modules will "Dial up the WOW!" and they certainly deliver. I get very pretty, very bright light, nice shimmer and very happy critters. BEHOLD:

2 comments:

  1. whats is everything you go for the tank.. like everything on the light cause i just got one and wonder if you can give me the list... wanna upgrade my lights cause yours look so good

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