The Goldfish Garage is currently being retrofitted to upgrade it's lighting. The T8 fluorescent shop lights and various aquarium hoods are being replaced by custom made DIY light bars that I've designed. As far as I can tell, this method is by far the best, cheapest, most efficient and simple design I've seen. Some of the Big Aquarium DIY guys have designs but they miss the boat being over thought and overly complicated. LEDs are directional, so any design bouncing the light off a reflector is flawed as light intensity falls off exponentially with distance and reflective surface refract and deflect light in away that is less efficient than directly shining the light at the water surface.
There are three basic areas to cover. The LED strip themselves, the power supply and controller if RBG and substrate the strip is mounted to.
The LED's I'm using are 5 meter (16.5 feet) 5630 (chip size) waterproof in cool or natural white. I purchase them on Amazon or Ebay. I have a few RED BLUE GREEN (RGB) strips but they are not bright enough for my larger tanks and the wiring is more complicated so most will be the single color white strips.
The power supplies can range from a simple lap top type power supply for a single 5m roll on up to large central power supply units like I'm using. The unit I've installed is a 360 controller that can run up to about 100 feet of 5630 LED ribbon. The power supplies are 12 volt and generally referred to as Switching power supply.
The light bars are made with 3/4 inch x 3/8 inch thick walled Aluminum channel. I get it from a local steel yard and it is $13.50 for a 16 feet sections.
Supply mounted in metal box.
Cut the epoxy
Bend
Remove
