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?
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?