AquaticEngineer

Been up and running now since last summer. Plumbed it into the rest of my tanks so its about 500 gallons total. Sent from my Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2

You can get the major components off ebay for under $60 shipped. The heatsink, fan, wiring etc can be sourced locally for pretty cheap. As long as you have an adequate heatsink and fan your light should last forever. I added in a thermal switch that kills the power to the LED chip if it ever runs over 130F to prevent it from frying. The switch was like $2.

Well I was gonna have more than one in there, they get lonely you know I havn't decided how tiny I'm going to go, but I've had an anemone in a vase on my window sill since december only eating phtyo plankton and tigroprius that are growing in there with him and all is well The vases are a bit green from all the pyhto plankton reproducing, but I'm going to use small bivalves to clean the water. Gotta dig around and see if my larger shrimp are still alive in there.

Well I was gonna have more than one in there, they get lonely you know I havn't decided how tiny I'm going to go, but I've had an anemone in a vase on my window sill since december only eating phtyo plankton and tigroprius that are growing in there with him and all is well The vases are a bit green from all the pyhto plankton reproducing, but I'm going to use small bivalves to clean the water. Gotta dig around and see if my larger shrimp are still alive in there.

So this may be your solution for a tiny tank chiller without having to drill at all. http://salem.craigslist.org/hsh/3035517874.html You would just have to keep a contained bottle with one in and one out sitting in the chiller. You could use a small pump like an aqualifter to move water and the container in the wine chiller should hold a constant temp of chilled water that feeds back into your main tank. They even have a 2 bottle version: http://eugene.craigslist.org/app/3071247708.html And those are both cheap options at $10 and $25 dollars, and are much smaller and quieter than the mini fridge, and are designed to run all the time since they are TEC cooling.

Is there a minimum size the tank has to be? I'm thinking of a fairly rediculous idea that may just work

Yeah I have a couple small acrylic cubes that are gathering dust if you want em to play with

For the tank size you are planning on doing, have you asked around to see if anyone has a used Iceprobe chiller they may part with for cheap?

Also, tigriopus californicus make a great micro/pico tank feeder. I have a bunch you can have as well as live phyto to feed to you tank

Is your house temperature controlled? My first ever attempt at a coldwater tank back in highschool I made a mini fridge chiller and it worked out Ok, but it was in my parents house that they kep at 68F year round. Does your fridge have a freezer compartment built into it? If it does, I would use heavily salted water, a propylene glycol mixture, or a glycerol mixture in the internal bucket to lower the freeze point. I froze a couple buckets of water in mine before I finally ended up using a mini freezer and a bucket of non-toxic antifreeze. Just keep in mind that these style chillers are the least efficient way to chill a tank, but definitely the most cost effective for short term. Fridge compressors just aren't designed to be chill things constantly, so if the water in the tank has a larger thermal gain than what the fridge can handle chilling than your fridge compressor will run almost constantly. The good thing is you can get a mini-fridge just about any day of the week for under $20 or free on craigslist As for livestock...............we got lots of small Sitka Shrimp and small anemones. We can get small starfish for you as well, just let us know when you want them The starfish we would get for a small tank like yours would likely be these: Leptasterias aequalis, Common Names: Colorful six-rayed star, six-rayed Star, broad six-rayed star, delicate six-armed star

I bet it'd hold at least a couple days worth of food for him

Any interest in a juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus

Bummer :( I wonder if any of these made their way over......

How thick is the acrylic?

I got a ton of tigriopus californica and live phytoplankton growing out if you want any. Totally free since I cant seem to use all anyways, lol. I set up my growouts to mimic their naturally occurring habitat here in Oregon where I collect them so they are pretty much self sustaining biotopes. Hit me up if you want one, just give em sun light and watch your free food grow

There were some killer minus tides this last weekend, which is why it was probably stranded. They are usually found just off shore or in deeper parts of coastal bays. I was able to collect Painted Anemones and encrusting Hydrocorals that are normally only accessible by diving Cant wait until the end of the month when the bigger minus tides hit.

Silverspot sculpin (Blepsias cirrhosus) Still got him? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=silverspot+sculpin&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=fJWoT4HZGeaciAK2v-3DAg&biw=1024&bih=395&sei=g5WoT-X7NqihiAKZiajBAg

Same exact light that Ecoxotic is selling for $400 plus dollars. You can even get the high end LED chip that they use if you really wanted to, they are not that much more expensive than the cheapo chinese ones I've been using. I believe theres is a Bridgelux. Only difference is the brand of LED Chip, and they use a passive heatsink by making the entire housing out of aluminum whereas I've been going the cheap route with a CPU Heatsink and fan.

Hmmm, are you planning on running a canopy or running it open top?

Center overflow on the back wall of the tank? You could mount the light on a swivel head and slightly forward of the center of the tank so that you could angle it to point slightly towards the back of of the tank.

Oh, and dont forget to put your $3 dollar thermal switch inline on it so that if your fan dies it doesn't over heat I learned that the hard way.

If I was going to do it over a 36x36x30 tank I would us a single 100 watt LED and with a 60 degree optic and hang it about 6" off the water. With the 60 degree optic you get a 12"x 12" light footprint for every 12" you go up. So if it was a total of 36" away from the bottom of the tank you would have zero light wasted and have complete coverage at the bottom of the tank. Take into account 3" of sand and youd could mount your light 9" over the tank. Granted if you ran a 30 degree optic, you could mount your light 72" away from the tank and get the same results if you wanted to I was going to do that and use a recessed can light into my ceiling. For heat distribution the best way I figured out to make a very cheap high output cannon style light was to combine 4 equal sized round heat sinks end to end (grab em used at goodwill) with thermal conductive material to create a larger heatsink. Large fan at one end, LED Chip with your choice of lens mounted to the other end. Wrap the whole thing in a thin sheet of aluminum or a solar tube and hang it where you want it. You can mount the LED driver anywhere you want in line, and a very small power supply for the fan so it could be all the way by the power plug in. Shove all the driver/power supply stuff in a 3 dollar project box from radio shack and you're done. I just have no need for high powered lighting anymore since none of my animals are photosynthetic really, lol.

Still running over my 3 ft deep coldwater tank I planned on making more of them just been busy with the new business. If you have access to a big chunk of aluminum and a CNC machine, you could make a heatsink that would eliminate the need for the fan, but its far cheaper to go with the cpu fan/heatsink combo.

See what days the LFS' get their liverock in. When I was working in eugene at a store we used to get handfulls of hitch hiker crabs and shrimp in the bottoms of the boxes.

Is your tank dry right now or is it running? If you're just starting and its a dry tank I would spray the foam right onto the tank, then you have no worries about it floating at all because its bonded to the tank. I do all mine out of nothing but foam, no rock, no sand. I pour rock salt on top of the foam as it is setting up to add texture and then use epoxy paint to make it look like real rock.