# LED retrofit - Aquastyle



## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

Here comes another DIY LED retrofit thread. I ordered two kits for 46G FW (retrofit) and 20G SW frag tank. The kit arrived today.

The box arrived damaged, hoping for no damages to parts inside the box.










Luckly, things look fine.










All contents taken out of the box.










I got 2 smaller heat sinks for 36" retrofit kit /w 14 LEDs. All necessary parts were included, and price was reasonable. No taxes paid upon pick up at Canada Post office.

Light fixture to be retrofitted.










Position of heatsinks when completed.










Close up of connectors and other parts. Interestingly enough, the potentiometers are made in japan (at least that's what's written on it).










All LEDs.. the lenses are slip-on fitting, and looks high quality. All lenses are individually packaged.










Fan comes with all necessary parts to complete installation.










Overall, for the price the kits are very good value. In the next post I hope the retrofit fixture would be completed.


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## ThaChingster (Feb 25, 2011)

how much did this cost?


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

For both kits it cost $250 and much of it was shipping.

So both fixtures are completed now. Here's the FW fixture retrofit.

The guts are cleared out, you see two modules ready to be installed into the plastic casing.










All complete. Actually there were few adjustments made after this. Originally it had 14 LEDs, 10 whites, 2 royal blues and 2 reds. However, the reds didn't look good at all, and needed a bit more light toward the center, so two additional whites were added, and reds were replaced with blues.










The fixture over my 46G planted community tank with discus. Looks not bad at all in person.










Here's the 24LED fixture for SW frag tank.










and the fixture over 20G badly scratched frag tank


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## tom g (Jul 8, 2009)

*lighting*

wow that's nice how much was the lighting for the frag tank , is that enough to grow frags , does it have white lighting as well as i would like to do something similar for my bio cube tank 
thanks 
tom


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

tom g said:


> wow that's nice how much was the lighting for the frag tank , is that enough to grow frags , does it have white lighting as well as i would like to do something similar for my bio cube tank
> thanks
> tom


I'm hoping it is good enough, currently experimenting.

Cost is $99 plus shipping, and shipping is around $40 for this one.

It does have white lights - 12 whites and 12 blues.


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

By the way, the frag tank gets water from my main tank, about 3G each week. There's no filteration or skimmer. Couple of power heads and some LRs and chaeto, that's all.

Acros frags appear to show better color (lighter tone, with most brown pigments gone) and it's only been a few days (less than a week).


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## ameekplec. (May 1, 2008)

Hey Conix, any updates with this? I'm looking to replacing teh T5 fixture over my little frag tank with LEDs, and this looks like a nice cheap option.

What's your take on the kit/fixture?


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

I have two fixtures, one over FW and another over SW frag tank. Unfortunately, I cannot evaluate performance on the SW frag tank properly, as it has not been maintained (flow/water change/lighting schedule - timer broke down). 

I see a big difference in FW tank though. Some of the plants are growing too fast, and it's a low tech (no CO2), which means anything that needs good source of lights for photosynthesis, this solution will work nicely.

Overall, the quality seems good enough, and easy to build.

I still plan to build a larger fixture using the kit from this place for my SW 75G tank. However, that could be months away until I find enough time to spare doing this. I'm just having enough difficulties keeping up with maintenance of these two tanks.

By the way, I feel LED lighting is superior to T5 or MH. The light spectrum does not have much sharp spikes like T5 or MH, which means LED lights are closer to sunlight. Overall, my fixture on FW tank doesn't look very bright to my eyes, compared to the T5 fixtures I had before, but growth of these plants are substantially better.


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