SunBrite's PAR38 LED Spots To Flood USA

it appears they screw into conventional sockets.... one thing im confused on is that the display of the tank says 9watts@$119... someone else asked about wattage per gallon. im guessing that based on that cost wattage per gallon is out the window when it comes to LED? considering it'd take about 55 of those 9watt'ers to equal 500watts of electricity.

 

watts per gallon is definitely a "rule of thumb" sort of thing, not meant to be taken literally, but as a starting point.... Since LED's are becoming much more efficient, the wattage they use is starting to go down as the light output goes up. What we need in the aquarium industry/ hobby is a better, more standardized representation of PAR and light output than "watts". I think the entire lighting industry is probably going through the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw better standardization eventually, but it may take a while for the industry to catch up to the technology.

 

Yeah, people should not go by wpg anymore. It's too confusing for those that are asking the questions about lights usually.

 

I look forward to seeing how these perform with corals.

 

yeah i agree. considering how much time ive spent recently reading about lighting trying to make a decision on my purchase has been quite tough. there are so many options.

 

I did say that WPG was bad. But my question was if the par at the coral is the same I can use just one bulb pointed at the few corals? Possibly a small frag tank situation. and are the bulbs self contained like everything included, no buying any power supply? would be way worth the price that way

 

This is a very complex question. Go to the lighting section of this forum and check the top few posts.

 

I don't see why not. Light is light, if you have enough par for one coral, and point the light so that it covers the one coral, then the coral is getting enough light, no? It's definitely a different take on tank lighting, but may be more efficient... just think of all that light that's wasted on rocks, sand and tank walls that otherwise doesn't need light.

 

So if you had a light loving species on the sand (say a clam) and you didn't want to cook the whole tank to satisfy the needs of a single specimen, you could use the spotlighting abilities of an LED to provide the needed PAR to that spot in the tank. You would want to be cautious about color temperature of course not just the PAR value, and watch to make sure it doesn't move out of the light.

 

I wonder how it would look ascetically to have a LED spotlight on a portion of the tank.