spoon

Maybe 45cm in deepest part, it gets the morning sun but is shaded during most of the day so haven't had to much algae problems. There are a lot of plants in there too and a 12000lph pump and pondmate filter so it all helps

Haha, it's a reflection of clouds

Nearly 5 years ago I purchased my first house, one of the first things I did was dream of having a pond. The pond came up at the right time at an unbelievably low price from friends. It's a custom built fibreglass pond quite large (couldn't get it up driveway on trailer) it originally had a large water fall to match but the original owner decided to keep that part. Looking at the hole I was going to have to dig and how accurate I needed to get it to fit the contours, I thought bugger that and flattened off a site and infilled around the pond making it raised slightly instead. I ended up taking 20-30cm off the edge of the pond with a jigsaw so it would comply with local council rules concerning fencing. Had all the river rocks already in a another part of the garden and over a few years planted it slowly with a semi Japanese theme. I also built a small waterfall. I don't know how many fish I have in there but a couple of them are original fish from my goldfish tanks years ago in the forum, returned by friends that I had given them to. Here are photos of progress

Yeah sorry about that I only have limited photos of the build, but used 4 cheap CPU fans 2 on each heatsink. Turned voltage down on a small power supply to about 10v so they weren't so noisy

Here are some photos

So after running LEDs for years, I decided I liked the look of metal halide better. The shimmer lines it creates along the tank are awesome and led is only just starting to come close with units such as the kessil that use a closely packed array of LEDs. Most commercially available metal halide systems use to or Pl tubes for supplemental light such as actinic light. While this works fine it's heavy on power use and not as customisable as led. There is also having to replace the fluorescent tubes as well as mh bulb around every 9 months. So I set out to have a play with making a hybrid of led and metal halide. I had a spare shop fitting 150w metal halide with a good German electronic ballast which I decided to remote mount to keep the weight of the light unit down. I used a 15000k bulb in this, quite a crisp white. I decided on 2 channels of 20w each for the LEDs and purchased cheap 20w drivers, an assortment of cree 3w LEDs, 2 heatsinks, 4 fans and a mix of 60° and 120° lenses. I decided to cluster the LEDs together as tight as I could and Mount them as close to either side of the metal halide fixture as I could. This was because I intended on using led colours like red and cyan that do not blend well with other led colours. And I wanted to minimise the "disco" effect apparent with a lot of led units ( multiple coloured shadow casts). Drilled and tapped the heatsinks to mount led stars using m3 nylon screws, I used a thermal grease on the back of the led stars. I then soldered up LEDs and tested them. First time I had 2v on the heat sink , I traced this to a tiny bit of solder dribble that I cleaned up. 2v may not sound like very much but when it is at a constant current of 600ma it can still give you a decent belt. This build being a few years ago I can't remember all the specs of what I used, but some of the led colours included cyan, red 680lm, Royal blue, blue, uv389nm, neutral white. The LEDs were wired into 2 channels one was white red orange and blue other was cyan, uv and blues Royal blues. All LEDs were 3w cree (maybe a couple of bridgelux) on 20mm stars. Each channel had a separate driver and power cord. The drivers were 600ma with LEDs in series, they worked out being slightly underdriven. Since this was my first play around with 3w LEDs I didn't bother with dimmable drivers or high quality equipment or go as far as buying specific bin number LEDs. I didn't even put an on/off switch on it, opting to instead use a 3 socket timer I had already to turn it on and off. I made up a metal enclosure using galvanised louvre panels and welded up an aluminium frame so it could sit on the trim on the top of my tank. The enclosure ended up pretty ugly looking but functional. After a bit of testing with an infrared thermometer I was happy enough with heat levels to be happy to use it. Got it checked, tested and tagged at my wife's work. Coral growth was similar to the previous led unit I was using but I was a lot happier with the colour of the light and the metal halide shimmer. Despite trying to minimise the disco effect it was still slightly apparent especially when metal halide was turned off. After around 6 months old scrapped it to try making a new unit in a better enclosure which I'm close to finishing now.

Yes she's pretty full on, but smart so getting better behaved with training. Loves people and other dogs heaps, our cats not so much....

Yep but even more important is par. Spectral difference from different bin number LEDs can also make a difference. Many of the higher end LEDs are built with this in mind. These cheapies are just about bang for buck. I would say values would vary wildly. wouldn't have a clue of the output of my lights in par only that they work well enough for my application but just have reliability issues.

Yes very true, my point for mentioning the "tricks" is the average consumer has no idea they aren't getting 120w at the LEDs.

So we got a huntaway x pup just after Christmas, named her Charlie. She's quite a character and is about 6 months old now. Had a bit of a medical mishap after being fixed and nearly died but after a long surgery and long recovery she's back to her normal Nutter self

So a few years ago my trusted cheap Chinese led unit dropped a channel so I decided to investigate it and pull it apart. It came apart easily with about 8 screws removed I was greeted by two half as per photos below, the first half consisted of 3 cooling fans; overly noisy and running on 12v, the fan power supply and 4 drivers from memory they were rated 80-130v at 300ma and the 4 channels were controlled by 2 simple on off switches each operating two drivers (channels) of the same colour either blue or white. A common modification for these type of units is to add a resistor or fan speed controller to trim the fan speed back making the fans quieter, I never bothered as my overflow box weir at the time was noisier anyway. The second half consisted of wires going to the drivers, heatsink plate and leds. If you notice in photos the heatsink plate is very thin and has no fins this is a cost cutting method as the LEDs are underdriven at 300ma rather than the 350ma epistar LEDs are designed for. This has the fortunate effect of increasing the life of LEDs by reducing heat. This also means the LEDs are no longer 1w LEDs more like 0.8w and can have an effect on the spectrum of light being output ( not really an issue here as they grew coral fine anyway, but a consideration for more advanced builds) the light is meant to be using 120 w of power but has only 112 "1w" LEDs so theoretically it's only about as good as 90-100 1w LEDs being properly driven at 350ma. The rest of the power is used by fans and heat losses. Also of note looking at photo of pcb with LEDs on it is the colour of LEDs , the yellow ones being the white colour, clear being blue and brownish ones being uv(on blue channels). The white ones are coloured yellow due to a Yellow phosphor coating, they are actually blue underneath and the blue light excites the phosphor into emitting white light. Interesting to note there is no such thing as a true white led, they are all either phosphor coated blues like this (thicker orange phosphor coating for warm white) or made up of a combination of red, green and blue LEDs tightly clustered on the same chip to mix together and give out white light. The uv LEDs are something I recommend people avoid with cheaper LEDs as these epistar uv LEDs don't last long. The brown colour is where the uv light has broken down the epoxy protecting the led. At this point I wanted to diagnose Wether the faulty channel was an led fault or driver fault so I unplugged and swapped over the driver from the faulty circuit to one from a good circuit (these just have small leads that unclip) as it still didn't work I knew it was an led problem and not a driver. Then came the next task, removing around 120 very tiny screws that attached the pcb/LEDs to the heat sink plate, took a very long time ,... So so fiddly. I then tested each led individually with very old batteries from a small flash light til I came across the faulty one. The 112 LEDs in this light are arranged in four circuits each with 27 LEDs in series . If one led in the 27 goes all go. This is what happened here. I removed this faulty led and bridged it temporarily with a small piece of wired soldered across, knowing that the other LEDs could safely handle the small increase in voltage until replacement LEDs arrived. I ordered replacement epistar LEDs from eBay, less than $1 each and also ordered enough to replace the uv ones. After painstakingly removing the 120 odd tiny screwed I had carefully put back in a few weeks earlier, I then soldered in the new LEDs. It's small and fiddly desoldering and resoldering these units and you have to be careful to do a good job as you don't want to be pulling those tiny screws out again to repair a dry solder joint in a few months. Repairs all done and worked well until about a year later and a power surge destroyed all the drivers. I managed to buy another unit the same cheap from another local reef keeper which had one channel that flashed all the time. Was fine for keeping my corals alive for a few weeks until the flashing drove me nuts and I had this unit apart too. Using the same process I discovered it was a driver at fault. My electrical knowledge doesn't extend far enough to repair a driver so I decided to replace it. After an hour searching I found the exact driver on dhgate.com for $14. When it arrived simply plugged it in and and I was good to go. It's good knowing what you are buying when it comes to cheaper LEDs and all of the cheap Chinese led units I've seen use the same tricks to reduce cost or increase lifespan regardless of whether they use 1w or 3w LEDs so it's worth looking into how they work and how much of the claimed wattage is actually available to the LEDs. The quality of heatsink vary a lot too, some actually have decently thick finned types. The unit eventually started to rust and I started a project light to try get the best of led and metal halide.... New thread soon

Will definitely post more photos of reef and pond, as well as breeding project and a few diy projects I've done. There might even be some older reef photos of this tank in here somewhere

Hi fish friends, been a while since I've posted on the forum. I've made a few projects over the years since I last posted and I'm thinking my experiences would be much better posted on here , to be easily accessed by hobbyists worldwide rather than being lost hours later on a Facebook group. These day's I'm still in chch, I just have a small reef tank and a decent garden pond with goldfish. I've had a bit of success breeding maroon clownfish too. I look forward to sharing photos and project's with you all again

Look for a tube with a high CRI . CRI is colour rendition index and refers to the percentage of the viible light spectrum the tube puts out. Sunlight is 100 , a Philips graphica t8 tube is 98 so will bring out the most natural colours in the fish . You may how ever find it a bit too yellow looking which can be offset by using a blue tube, any blue tube will do doesn't have to be a marine one