led lighting question

D

Demitrio555

i saw a 215 led light fixture on web site real cheap. are all led lights the same? can a plant led light fixture be used on an aquarium?
 
Not all LEDs are created equal that setup is probably using 5mm LEDs and is very weak and I doubt will penetrate the water enough to give the par for growing coral. But without knowing more about the led setup I cant say much more
 
Very true... not all LEDs are created equal. In all the research I've been doing on them lately it even seems that they are creating higher quality LEDs rather quickly. So the high quality LEDs used in the no longer available Solaris lights have already been improved significantly. A single LED lamp can have .5 watt to 3 watts or more depending on the manufacturer, and can also have from warm white to cool white output. Personally I'm finding the Cree lamps to be putting out a higher quality, maybe even better than Luxeon. Where the LuxeonStar has a rating of 32 lumens, the new Cree XL XP-G has a 132 lumens per watt. Very few of the lamp specs are showing any kind of PAR rating and fewer still have lumen ratings. In trying to compare it I found this from Specialty lights on the internet: " A typical 54 Watt T5 HO (High Output) bulb produces 5000 lumens which is equivalent to 92.6 lumens per watt..." I read a rumor on a forum that Current USA is going into LED lights... maybe, maybe not... but they have discontinued all their HQI fixtures. IMHO any light fixture you buy now using LED technology will not be as good as the ones available in 6 months to a year down the road. This technology is improving in leaps and bounds. There's an article on Glass Box Design http://glassbox-design.com/2009/aqua-illumination-cree-xp-g/ an Aqua Illumination using the new Cree XP-G lamps. There are sites that sell "aquarium" led lights... something like 250 leds, etc... but if they don't give the manufacturer of the lamp or details of light output on each lamp, I'd be very skeptical of what you're getting. Hope this is helpful.
 
I will also add that leds can get a lot weaker go down by as much as 50% after a lot less hours than these light makers are advertising. On the website of the led maker that was used in those Solaris lights, the led manufacturer claims the led that was used was weaker 40-50% after about 60-70% of the time that Solaris claimed. I know in some time the wattage will go up and the expense will come down to where they are worth buying for aquarium use, but that time is a few years away.
 
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