Hi yeah i looked all over the internet for videos but couldnt find one hence what I did here.
I had a similar Idea of have fans inside the unit, there are ventilation holes on each side of the hood, my plan was to use the fans you get in blade servers, add one on each side be a perfect cooling solution, the only reason I havent done it yet is becuase im not paying for server fans when i work in IT, i will get some from the next server upgrade project I do, probably i a week or so. if this doesnt work for what ever reason I will add some fans to the top, i think it will look pretty coo if I add 4 of these to the hood.
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php...=23220&zenid=5858981602b45e8049e7995711d84275
there PWM which means you could wire it to a LED controller and use the dimmable feature to control fan speed. so in theory if you wire it to you LED controller the brighter the lights go the faster the fans work. The geek in me likes this idea.
My heatsink isnt getting hot at all as I cant turn my lights on full or the corals will burn, I only tested it on full power for one day I imagine the highest I will go to is 70-80% power and it doesnt get hot at all, it is winter here though so maybe in summer that may become an issue.
The reason I ran the cables below was because I couldnt fit the ammount of wiring needed to join and power the LEDS over two hoods,
example is
I have 14 cool Whites which needed to be powered by 1 driver, I wanted the spectrum of light to be even across both heatsinks. The stock cable management was design for a single power cable to from inside the unit to outside the unit, it does this through a hollow plastic joint where the hinge lifts up. To avoide this you may be able to design the combination to not have a single driver shared over 2 hoods, I couldnt really do this because
a, I didn't know about it until I ordered everything and didn't order enough drivers to do it
b, my tank is smaller so have less options due to the number of LEDs I can comfortably fit on the heatsink, the light spectum was moreimportant then the 2 cables that hang down.
Tips, hmmm
I maybe wouldnt use use solderless again, for the layout I used, if your going to have a simple white and blue layout evenly spaced then solderless are great, if like me you going for different colour lights and want them in a certain position you may find soldering much neater.
If I was going to do it over I would use different drivers, not becuase they dont work but I would of like to try and place them in the hollow area in the hood rather then have them outside the tank. The meanwell drivers dont fit in the hood.
The curved heatsink but it sounds like you now have a solution for that
May look at a different controller if you want to control more then 3 channels, so far I have decent lighting control so im not going to upgrade yet but mayb in the future.
