LED wattage to Gallon ratio ?

Yeah, I've seen this formula on another forum. As others mentioned, there is no consideration of brand, optics or depth. So, yeah agree, pretty much useless.... Lighting is always tricky to estimate, LEDs especially so.

 

Agree with the last comments posted; there's no 'easy' rule to follow.

Depends on the tanks dimensions, optics desired, what you're keeping, and what diodes you're using.

 

PAR readings at different depths, spread, optics

 

my surface area is 300" so that would mean around 20 leds, which is the rate that i've seen.

However for example you have Cree, Luxeon, and Epistar... I believe Luxeons have the best PAR output, so where you would need 30 Epistars I will only need 20 of the Luxeon

 

300" square,cubed? Can we get dimensions?

 

Let me know how that light works I was looking at that as well.

 

turn down the current if you're using optics.
with regards to brand i was thinking cree, not the xml.

use optics, or turn the current up, if you dont sue optics lower your fixture near the water.

many ways of skinning a cat.
what i posted is a rough idea on how to come up with a number of LED's without using the watts/gal.

 

biocube dimensions are 15" tall 15" deep 20" wide

from the research that i have done it appears Luxeons are the newest and best LED lights available for a fair price, looks like they are much better than the Cree

 

if you dont want to go with the length x width divided by x number, you might want to go to reefledlights, they compare the number of led's against those of a metal halide 150watts upto 450watts. so if you want to get same par as metal halide 450 watts, they tell you how much led you need. if you want to match the par of a 150 watt MH, they also tell you that.