Has there been any advancement in LED lighting yet?

zeromus-x

Member
I asked this question probably a year or two ago here, and was going to bump up that thread, but the search won't let you search for "LED" -- too small of a word.
As I posted on another board, I'm going to have a spare aquarium available, a ~34 gallon bowfront. I'm interested in LED technology for lighting the tank, but I can't find any real information online. It appears Solaris has a light that costs an incredible amount of money, but that's pretty much it. The Solaris unit has twenty-five 3W LEDs. Thirteen are blue, twelve are white. It looks like they're using the Luxeon III Emitter fixtures, which puts each white light at around 75 lumens and each blue aroud 30 lumens. That gives us a total light output of (900 + 390) 1,290 lumens.
Now, take for example, Chauvet's ColorStrip LED light:

This LED light at full brightness puts out 1,127 lux; in other words, at a one meter distance you're looking at 1,127 lumens. One meter is a little bit further than the average aquarium light is going to be shining, so I'd say we could bump up that value to be comparable with the output of the Solaris light. The main difference here is that the ColorStrip uses RGB LEDs to simulate white light while the Solaris uses only white and blue.
I have four ColorStrips that get absolutely no use during the day. Could something like this function as an aquarium light? It wouldn't be hard to make a stand for them that pointed them straight down at the tank, they produce no heat, and they can be programmed with an external controller to change colors (though most DMX controllers are set for significantly smaller time frames; I suppose you could use a simple DMX board to fade the lights out as the day went through, or even do it with software on the computer using a USB to DMX box).
Obviously I'm not aware of the color temperature these lights would be putting out and I have no idea how you'd even measure it. My biggest worry would be the absence of true "white" light. Could that be a problem here?
 

scsinet

Active Member
I have to say I like this idea. I never thought of using the DMX protocol to control aquarium lights. This is a neat idea

If you use a computer based DMX interface, then you could easily use a stage control program or even write your own. If you are programmatically inclined, I know there are DMX activeX controls available, so you could write something in Visual Basic, etc to do whatever you want... even lunar cycles.
If I were you, I'd give this a try. An experiment with a few frags would certainly help us get some sort of empirical data on how this type of thing would work. I (and I know others here) would certainly love to see how this works out. I never thought of looking to stage lighting as an alternative to the Solaris technolgy.
 

zeromus-x

Member
Originally Posted by SCSInet
http:///forum/post/2452657
If I were you, I'd give this a try. An experiment with a few frags would certainly help us get some sort of empirical data on how this type of thing would work. I (and I know others here) would certainly love to see how this works out. I never thought of looking to stage lighting as an alternative to the Solaris technolgy.

Because I'll be setting up a new tank for this experiment, I'm going to try it with a 10 gallon first. I figure my bowfront tank is a significant amount deeper and I'd like to try with something easy first. Since it's going to be a new tank it'll take a while to get it running -- I'll be using water from my existing setup at work, and I've already got plenty of live rock and sand to kickstart things.
 

zeromus-x

Member
The 36" Aquaillumination units are $1,890.00. The Colorstrips I'm referring to are the same size for $200 bucks. Even a pair of them is almost a fifth of the cost.
 
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