About a month ago I replaced the CF tube in my fish tank with LED strips. It was all good for a while but I noticed a few things starting to go wrong with my first attempt. The LED strips were sagging, the backing glue was just not holding them, and in addition to that all the strips became dimmer and looked like they had some burn in happening.


This is what it looked like when I opened up the light fixture...


To address the sagging, I decided to cut out some acrylic pieces to hold the LED strips in place. I figured that three should be enough. I didn't bother cleaning them up because they'd be out of sight anyway.


With regard to the burn in, I thought it's either due to heat or electrical current. The acrylic sheets used to stop the sagging should help with heat as they will force the LED strips to be in contact with the base acrylic sheet and dissipate heat through it. I also figured that if I connected the white strips in parallel instead of in series, it could help with any voltage/current issues. I ended up rewiring them slightly...




The new wiring diagram looks like this...


The new wiring was working as expected.


I sealed all the exposed ends with silicone again and let it skin over before fitting back to the fish tank. So far it looks good, but I did order some other LED strips to try out anyway.


-i