about led lights

[ericcarlsoc]

hey i have a 72 inch metal halide 3 250 watts metal halide and 4 blue attnic blubs what is the best led strip lighs out on the market right now and what color should i get to have the best coral colors i have mostly sps corlas and a few lps please i need some advice thanks

 

[DaveK]

As typical for lighting, there is no one best solution. Lighting is a very personal choice, and because of this, it comes down to what you want.

My first question to you is how big a tank are we talking about? The lighting you have could be on anything from about a 125 to 250 gal tank and up.

Most likely, if you go with LED lighting, you end up spending quite a bundle. Most systems would use a combination of white and blue LEDs with each color dimable, so you you can set your own color. Expect to get a system using 3w leds and spend quite a bit of money. The smaller LEDs are not going to cut it on a reef tank.

 

[mojoreef]

One thing to also remember is that unlike a full spectrum MH bulb LED's have all their spectral range in a very narrow band. SO if you were to look at a spectral chart of a MH bulb you would see a spike in the blue, then another in the yellow/orange and then another in red. With a LED its all going to be one range, and 99% percent of what is on the market is going to be in the blue zone, so 425-475 nm. It makes a big difference when it comes to your corals and photon absorbsion.

I have done a lot of research on this one and spent all of last week with Sanjay and Dana Riddle and I cant say their is a decent one on the market that actually has a full spectrum or has a decent spread rate. So I would wait for a bit before diving in. If you are a DIY guy Guerry on RS here has a very good build that actually addresses the issues.


Mojo

 

[ericcarlsoc]

i have a 200 gallon tank i was hoping to get leds for more color in my purple red and blue acros sence there not colorful at all

 

[ericcarlsoc]

i use 20k 3 250 watts bulbs

 

[ericcarlsoc]

i would like some more help about this thanks

 

[nanoreefing4fun]

Here a good :read: http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forums/equipment/69696-so-whats-deal-these-leds.html

 

[nanoreefing4fun]

I cant say their is a decent one on the market that actually has a full spectrum or has a decent spread rate.

Mike - so you don't think the current leds on the market like the AI Sol and Cree are going to sustain quality corals over a period of time like a couple of years? Is full spectrum lights a requirement of this? I really know little about leds, I have T5's but I enjoy learning about them. Seems we would soon have some empirical data, as so many people are now starting to run them.

 

[mojoreef]

No I think they will grow coral as well as MH's. Its not that they are incapable its just their not very efficient right now and a way over priced. Here is what I mean, I took my Apogee par meter and went out and tested several lights (actually ended up taking it to Macna and tested every light their, lol). Anyway on say the AI Sol the fellow had the fixture about a foot over the tank, it measured about 255 par at 6 inches below the water and then around 220 at 12 Inches, and these had the optics in place. So when you look at par say in a MH you would say this is terrible, but because almost all the par on a LED is in the 425-475 mn mark it all becomes usable for zoox, in the MH it would be across the whole spectrum and only part would be directly usable and the balance indirectly usable. So bottom line not to bad but nothing to write home about. Then when I moved the meter about 3 inches off the outside edge the fixture and the par dropped to 40? so no pread what so ever, if its not directly under it, its not going to get photons. Then the fellow told me that it cost between 500 and 600 per unit and I passed out!!

So for 600 bucks you get a light that is somewhat usable (not the best) has no spread so you would have to cover the whole lighted area with multiple units. Soooo not really good enough yet and way over priced. Oh and the 50000 hour thing is somewhat correct but the problem is that everything else involved with the fixture will die way before that ever happens.

anyway just my observations so far.

Mojo

 

[ReefLEDLights]

No I think they will grow coral as well as MH's. Its not that they are incapable its just their not very efficient right now and a way over priced. Here is what I mean, I took my Apogee par meter and went out and tested several lights (actually ended up taking it to Macna and tested every light their, lol). Anyway on say the AI Sol the fellow had the fixture about a foot over the tank, it measured about 255 par at 6 inches below the water and then around 220 at 12 Inches, and these had the optics in place. So when you look at par say in a MH you would say this is terrible, but because almost all the par on a LED is in the 425-475 mn mark it all becomes usable for zoox, in the MH it would be across the whole spectrum and only part would be directly usable and the balance indirectly usable. So bottom line not to bad but nothing to write home about. Then when I moved the meter about 3 inches off the outside edge the fixture and the par dropped to 40? so no pread what so ever, if its not directly under it, its not going to get photons. Then the fellow told me that it cost between 500 and 600 per unit and I passed out!!

So for 600 bucks you get a light that is somewhat usable (not the best) has no spread so you would have to cover the whole lighted area with multiple units. Soooo not really good enough yet and way over priced. Oh and the 50000 hour thing is somewhat correct but the problem is that everything else involved with the fixture will die way before that ever happens.

anyway just my observations so far.

Mojo

How did we fare?

We brought our PAR meter too and walked around doing tests on the lights.
Sanjay's presentation was great and touched on issues that we have been talking about and that we teach other reefers about. I got to meet with him afterward and nerd it up as we had some of the same concerns with colour representation so we will be sending him one of our DIY fixtures so he can test it out at the same standards as the others.

 

[mojoreef]

You know I dont have a clue, lol when I was walking around at macna I wasnt really paying attention to who I was testing, just looking for a different result. If you talked with Sanjay I might have been standing next to you as, we all (including Sanjay) kind of traveled in a pack, to the manca, to the bar, Back to macna and then back to the bar again?? lol.

I actually made kind of an indirect pitch for you earlier in this thread. The only fixture I have ever seen and looked at par testing for came out of your company and was put together by a member here named Guerry (not sure what his screen name is here, but its guerry on RF) I spent a most of the weekend talking with both Sanjay and Dana Riddle on the output and thus effects of the led (from a spectral point of view) I have alot of information of coral pigments and the spectral zones they absorb in and then what colors they flouresce it wouldnt take to long to put together a combination of LEDs to hit close to a full spectrum coverage.


Mojo

 

[nanoreefing4fun]

Thanks for the replies... ^ I enjoy reading about leds ! I have learned quite a bit from ReefLEDLights post too.

 

[BigAl07]

Mike have you seen where at least one LED Fixture manufacturer has incorporated a few Red and Green LED into the mix for this very reason? What are your thoughts?

 

[BLAKEJOHN]

Mike have you seen where at least one LED Fixture manufacturer has incorporated a few Red and Green LED into the mix for this very reason? What are your thoughts?

Ecotech has and claims to have a full spectrum. But since nobody really has one yet to respond with actually long term data, I think their unit falls a little short of their claims. And at $750 per unit, well leds should be going down in price, not up.

Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk

 

[mojoreef]

Yea their are a few now or at least two I know of for sure. One is Orphic??? and cant remember the other. Let me see if I can explain this.

Ok so here is a spectral chart of 400 watt MH's

So if you look at the chart you can see that most lights have spikes in a lot of ranges. So mainly in 425-475 and then again in the 530-560 and then in 575 -600 zones?? and then a bunch of little spikes inbetween.

So now look at a spectral chart for a number of leds

So if you look at any one particular LED wave you can see they really only cover one small area of the overall spectral range. SO what you would have to do is to build your own spectral set up. SO using the various whites will give you all the photons you need to create photosynthesis, But in keeping corals we also want to work the various pigments that are not in the zoox but in the tissue. So lets look at an example:

So lets say we add a green led, now this light has a wave that is in the 500 to 540 mn zone. Now on a corals this will excite a pigment called Red/Orange highly Fluorescing pocilloporin that primarily absorbs light from 500 to 540 nm (green) and fluoresces light with wavelengths that are primarily orange to red. So it will keep our red (to our eyes) corals red or if it was not their they would go kind of purple as another pigment would have become dominate. SO now if you add red led you are going to get light waves in the 620-650 zone? So that would cause the pigment Pocilloporin which primarily absorbs green/yellow/red (550-600 nm) light along with some upper UV-A . it emits a orange/red to become some what dominate and hold the color of corals look orange/reddish.

So basically you need to create your own full spectrum, you would do this bu checking out the waves that the LEDs put out and then comparing what the corals pigments like and matching them up. If that makes any sence,, lol

I did a little write up on it if your interested.

Reef Frontiers - How lighting effects corals

 

[mojoreef]

Ecotech has and claims to have a full spectrum. But since nobody really has one yet to respond with actually long term data, I think their unit falls a little short of their claims. And at $750 per unit, well leds should be going down in price, not up.

I just looked them up and yea you could say that they have built a somewhat full spectrum or at least kind of the way I was discribing but for a fixture that is only 12 by 7 inches and costs 750 bucks it falls into the catagory of to expensive and not enough output for the dollar.

Mojo

 

[steved13]

In looking at your graphs, I have to disagree with your conclusions. You may be right and I might be reading it wrong, but from what I see the LEDs have a broader spectrum.

The way I interpret the info...The MH graph show very sharp peaks which would indicate spikes in the spectrum and very specific wavelengths, whereas the LED graph flows more which would indicate a broader spectrum. You can only compare the "White LEDs" to the "white MH" as the various colors are designed to keep other spectrums out. If I look at the cree XP-g,3W cool white 10000-12000 and the 30W (I'm not sure if that's a typo) 14000-16000, you see a spike at 450nm but the ramp up and down are wider so at about 425nm to about 465nm it's at about 40% where the MH are mostly below 20% within 10nm. It's the same at the 550nm range...the LEDs are over 20% from about 525nm to 625nm where the MH peak and fall within about a 10nm spread.

Like I said I may be reading the graphs wrong, I'm no expert in this, but that's the way it looks to me.

 

[mojoreef]

Steve the side bars are different on the MH then they are on the LEDs, MH is spectral irradience and the LED is relative radience power percentage.So it is just showing how much percentage of the power goes to a spectrum range.

 

[steved13]

I did see that, I figured they were comparable? I'm guessing now they are not?

Quick research indicated that the were kind of 2 sides of the same coin, and comparable.

 

[mojoreef]

No their are not the same, the one for LEDS is a measurement of percentage of light emitted by the light source at each wavelength, so in regards to the 3 watt cool white

It is telling you that about 25% of the light emitted in the say 550mn, make sence?? I couldnt find any proper spectral charts for LED/s but I want to show you that LEDs are narrow banded and that a MH has multiple spikes in multiple areas along the full spectrum, that is why they are called full spectrum. To get that with leds you are going to have to add multiple colors in order to add it in across the same spectral range.

Sorry for the muddy water


Mojo