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bleachandvomit

17 gallon's lighting predicament

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by
bleachandvomit
, 10-09-2010 at 02:49 AM (1621 Views)
So the DIY stunner strip was a failure. I gave it a chance, and the two daylight bulbs simply overpower the blue LED's.

I decided on ditching the LEDs, and swapping one D-D aquablue + for an ATI blue plus. According to the PAR levels by Grimreefers, this will actually take away about 2 - 5% PAR overall, but give a nice actinic look.

I tried the two daylights alone, and just couldn't force myself to like the aesthetics. A few of my mushrooms dissolved as well, so I think it had ill effects.

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Tags: lighting, par
Categories
‎ Lighting

Comments

  1. Jessy's Avatar
    Did I miss this DIY blog some where? I'm getting some real stunner strips for my tank. Why did you opt to go DIY?
  2. bleachandvomit's Avatar
    I ordered some blue flexible LED strips from china and wired them to an american 12v power supply.

    http://ledlightsworld.com/

    I got the tri-chip SMD5050's. If the Ecoxotics use a similar LED, I would steer clear. These things suck.

    It ended up being 20$ for 2 foot, I already had the power supply.
  3. clstreak's Avatar
    I know this is hearsay.. but we prize our aquariums to the upmost.. Im not going to say that china or anywhere else for that matter has inferior products but they dont have laws over there that govern patents and they can reverse engineer and resell things that may not be up to the same quality that is found at that $1.50 more counterpart. Now that being said I am all for saving money.. But it comes down to this are you willing to risk 3.10 3wt led or 1 3 wt led from a no name manufactuar..

    With leds being fairly new i will contiue to read on RC fourms and I will watch and read some more and form my own opinon and I want to see someones reef on day 1 then 5 years from now before i make the big jump.. Thats how new i belive this technology is..
  4. bleachandvomit's Avatar
    Yes Clstreak, I agree. It was a long shot for blue supplementation, only for looks not growth.

    For lighting with LEDs exclusively, I don't think the extremely narrow spectrum range of each colored LED can really be melded enough to match the broad spectrum of MH or T5's. The reason I say this is that Cree and other manufacturers don't make the LEDs tailored for our hobby's needs. We are basically combining colors and hoping for the best, some people have even gone as far as adding cyan and red LEDs to their fixtures to see if those colors have what cool white and blue LEDs are missing. No thanks.

    I would apologize for the rant, but it's my post!