|
Flybynight- I used a 20ft legnth of 3/8" titanium pipe bent into a large U-shape and burried about 7ft in the ground for cooling. Most all the comercial greenhouse coral farms use a similar method of using the earth for a heatsink. The only problem is you gotta keep at least 1-2 gallon per hour moving through it at all times. Otherwise, when it kicks on again and circulates that stagnant water back into your tank it smells so bad you would swear it is a sewer feed to your tank.
big400g- I don't know if you've allready bought your LEDs, but they make LEDs with 3-4 times the light output of the K2's from 2 years ago. That means you could go from 250 LEDs to 100ish, and still be making more light. Power draw would be cut by about 3-4 times as well.
Also, you can mix LEDs to get whatever color temp you desire, but you can't fix the spectrum problems of the LED.
All modern white LEDs are 460nm blue LEDs with thin phosphor flake positioned above the blue LED. The blue light stimulates florecence in the phosphor which emmits other longer wavelenghts of light. Since it is impossible to decrease wavelegnth during florecence, only increase it, those 460nm LEDs can never see the 410-430nm window that chloro A requries.
If you wana make an easy power supply, you can run strings of 45 LEDs in series, and use a single simple current control regulator straight from the 160VDC you get when you throw a rectifier and cap on the 110VAC stright out of the wall.
Also, just incase somebody was thinking of buying a bunch of them, buckpucks are a totally garbage product. They are like a last resort desperation thing if you just need to run a handful of LEDs and power efficiency doesn't matter.
|