Not Quite Sold on LED Lighting

LOL.. yes, and it took 37 years in the hobby to make that move.

As I said before, when I can buy a decent, reliable, reef-capable system with no assembly required for a reasonable price, I will revisit the issue. I'm pleased with my T5 and I'm not yet prepared to retire it from service.

 

I couldn't have said it better, myself.

 

LOL... I thought MH and T5HO would bring the end of PC, but not only has that not happened, but it's also just as expensive as ever.

Actually, I think that the LED advent may actually be helping to create new advances with T5HO; I've seen several new color combinations lately that have excellent results with corals.

 

I think the bigger trouble with LED is converting a mature reef to LED. Starting a tank with a quality LED unit/units has none of the aforementioned negatives. I mean, you never see a thread about someone with a new tank build that starts with leds that can't grow corals or keeps burning their corals for no apparent reason... It's always immediately (less than 6months) after switching to the new unit. Or after making some other sudden change to there schedule or % of each color. I know I tore up some corals with my first t5 fixture by getting all new bulbs and cleaning the reflectors all at once my first time I swapped the 4 bulbs. Fried a few corals during that learning experience... is that so different?

I wonder if people had some of the same troubles when they switched from t5 to MH or from PC to t5/mh, etc?

 

Yes, absolutely. Took quite a while to get my mushrooms and leathers acclimated from PC to T5HO, and burned all my zoas in the process. That was only 5 or 6 years ago.

 

I put 4 AI SOL Blues on my 265 and they give off way more light than 8 48" t5 HO....Im sold on my LED's In just a week i can see WAY more polyp extention on my SPS's

 

I beg to differ--- but most of the folks that I know that have successfully switched are using about half the wattage from what their halides used and they are getting very similar growth and PAR output. Perhaps you are saying that this can be attributed to the LEDs focusing their light directly downward, and halides do not. With that particular notion I obviously do not disagree.

Aside from that, if you are talking in terms of visible light, I don't know of a halide on earth that approaches the efficiencies of white LEDs--- meaning, 120-160 lumens/watt. I know lumens are limited in their use over a reef, but it's still a very telling piece of data.

I have to speak without having Sanjays chart handy. If you have a link, I'd be glad to look at it. If there is no link, please explain to me just what he's measuring (what LEDs, current, color temp, etc). Cheap LEDs aren't really any more efficient than a halide if they are driven at too high of a current.

You are talking about two different situations. I criticized LED units that use 10,000K and higher whites (in tandem with twice as many blues)---- but you posted graphs of 6500K and 4200K whites (with blues) compared to Radium/Phoenix bulbs. I don't disagree at all with what you said about growth and acclimation etc.

I criticized LED units that use high K temp whites, which I do not personally own a graph of to compare to anything like Radium etc. The information I gave you came from a guy who is now an employee of SeCore and was a marine biology student at UNC Wilmington, and his theory was that with some corals, the overabundance of blue can photoinhibit the coral.

Some of these units I've seen actually use 20K white LEDs plus an insane amount of blue. For shallow water corals, some of them may struggle to adapt to this.


That's all I was saying. I wasn't applying that across the board, if you look at the fuller quote of what I was saying. See below that I didn't try to apply this to all coral, all the time (which is a mistake we make frequently). We've all had corals fail under our Radiums/Phoenix and some fail under Ushio 10Ks, and light spectrum is frequently cited as the problem. Agreed?

I won't disagree with any of this . Acclimation is definitely a good idea and we've known for a long time (and now, with certainty) that LEDs put out a more wide spectrum color output, which is why colors under LEDs often have more "pop" when the corals are healthy.

A longer acclimation period is absolutely a good idea.


The problem here isn't an issue with quality/quantity of light--- it's an issue of understanding what's going on with the light. I'm tired of seeing people whine that LEDs are inferior--- when in reality the error is our lack of understanding of what's going on. I'm just trying to help with that.





As a side note, I do have access to a PAR meter. I used to have a 250w DE Phoenix bulb over my 25g tank (yes, overkill, but the corals were fine). I later added 8 Cree XRE royals (90 degree primary optic) running at 950mA.

Both the Phoenix 250 (with a sparkly clean reflector and clean glass cover) and the royal blues gave 50 micromols on the sandbed. I never understood that. A 250w Phoenix, at about 30" from the sandbed, should have given me more than 50 micromols, and certainly more than 8 Crees (roughly 27 watts). But it didn't. The tank sure looked neat though.

And yes, I did run across several SPS corals I couldn't keep in this tank, even though water parameters were great and I acclimated the corals quite carefully to the light intensity.

 

:clapping:

I have one serious question for all you pro-LED reefers: I know what the claims are concerning the longevity of LED fixtures, but I've been around electronics long enough to know they can and usually do fail long before the end of their perceived lifespan. That said, how long is the actual warranty on the units you're using?

 

ForEVAH!lol My guess is, they will last well beyond the point that you would keep them anyways! Meaning, by the time they are dying, chances are you'd have replaced them with the better model or better version anyways! or next wave of technology!

 

Not necessarily... My ol' T5HO is 6 years old and still going strong, and if it fried tonight, I can drop $150 and have a new one on my doorstep in 3 days. The technology is stable enough that I can expect another 5 - 6 years of trouble-free service.

My question was, how long is the warranty? I wouldn't entertain the thought of spending $800+ on a lighting system when the technology hasn't even been around long enough to prove it can last as long as the manufacturers claim, and especially if it only comes with a 6 or 12 month guarantee.