DIY Moonlights

[steveoutlaw]

I want to make a strip of moonlights for my 120g. Anybody have any recommendations on where I can get everything I need?

 

thanks.

[scott711]

radio shack has pretty much everything if you wanted to buy it retail. If not there are plenty off online places to buy the LED's, power packs, resistors, etc. There is a great website for learning if you don't know how. it is: http://www.kaotica.com/frag/diy/moonlight/

 

I just built a moonlight on my 38 gallon tank.

 

Scott

[dchild]

I'll split that $21 15-LED sample with ya if you are interested. These things are bright- it only takes a couple.

 

I have used the lights from AutoLumination.com and not been very impressed. Nathan (AquariaReview) has an excellent commercial unit which really makes his corals shine; the autolumination LEDs were just a blue light. I'm hoping these LEDs will give some more flourescence without the $80/unit price tag of Nathan's moonlight.

[xeon]

For LED's, ebay is tough to beat. You can get a lot of 50 blue LED's (5K mcd or above) for ~$10 + shipping. LED holders and resistors can be picked up at Radio Shack. Depending on how you wire them and how many you use... you may have an old supply around the house that will do the job.

 

In regards to wiring, serial is generally better in terms of the diode. On the other hand you need a fat enough power supply to handle the 3.4V (average for blues) drop through each diode. Ideally you want an 80% margin in the power supply. If you run 5 LED's ideally you'd want 21VDC on the supply. For "moonlighting" usage, I'm not really sure fluctuating currents due to the diode heating up will have much impact... so parallel is another option of course.

 

The advantage to parallel is you get equal voltage on each leg and the current split among the legs, essentially the inverse of a serial circuit. I also threw a wire wound 1500 ohm variable resistor into my setup to dim my LEDs. I have 10K mcd LEDs which are pretty dern bright.

 

There are LED calculators on the net if you need help finding the right resistor/s to use.