Led basics

[montoya]

Hello all.

I haven't been on the forum for ages. I hope all is well with everyone.

I'm starting a small 29 gallon "fish only" tank with a few small fish. I'm thinking of a basic LED fixture just to provide some viewing lighting. When I search for general info. on LED aquarium lighting I get the same very basic stuff - run cool and consume very little power. A few basic questions:

1) Color and temperature (same thing?) of the light never seems to be discussed with LED like it does with fluorescen (4500 K, 6000 K, 10,000 K, etc.t. Are all white LED lights the same in terms of color range they output?

2) How do you determine overall light output of an LED fixture? Fluorescent is all about watts, watts and more watts. Watts seem to not be mentioned with LED fixtures?

3) LED supposedly lasts a long, long time, but does it deteriorate in terms of quality over a fairly short period of time like fluorescent causing algae problems for example?

4) What's the difference between a $ 40.00 LED fixture and a $ 500.00 LED fixture? Does the more expensive model basically cram a lot more LED bulbs into a given space or is the light quality of the individual bulbs significantly better?

Thanks!

 

[Northstar24]

1) There are two different types of white LED's used. Cool White is one, and Warm White is the other. I forget exactly what the K rating is for them, but Warm Whites are generally the ones that you want. Kelvin rating is hard to nail down for any LED fixture that has dimmable channels for white and blue, because changing the intensity of the white or blue channels changes the associated Kelvin rating

2) Watts per gallon doesn't really apply to most LED fixtures - good ones are very, very efficient at giving corals the Par they need to grow. As an example, I replaced 1000 Watts of Halides and T5's over my tank with 225 watts of LED, and I cannot even run them at full power over my tank

3) They last longer than most people are in the hobby. The quality LED's have been tested by the manufacturers and have shown negligible phase shift or decrease in output

4) Huge Difference, nothing I said above applies to the cheap ass Ebay knock offs. Do your research, and ask questions of those of us that have LED's over their tank. LEDs are definitely capable of growing corals, but there are a lot of Chinese no name knock offs flooding the market right now - as with anything else in this hobby I would advise spending your money wisely

 

[Smitty]

Look into the marineland reef capable lights fixture...they aren't really expensive, and will allow you to keep low to moderate corals in a standard 29 gal tank.