Any Of These Leds Any Good

[chrisjd]

Hello

I'm thinking about upgrading the lights on my new planted tank to help the plants grow and give me more options as to what plants I can out in there. I have a 25usgal tank currently with a single T8 bulb (I think it's 20watt). I don't want to spend a lot of money, do any wiring or replace my hood so I was thinking of getting an LED bar of some sort to stick to the top of my hood. I have found a few under £50 that I'm considering:

There's The cheap and cheerful option but I'm worried that the LEDs won't be powerful enough to help the plants grow at all, plus it has a bad review.

There's This one that's designed for reefs but apparently can work for planted aquariums, but I'm worried that the colour temperature is wrong and that it might be too strong for my tank (I don't want to have to add co2).

Finally I could get the smallest version of the Arcadia Eco-Aqua LED Daylight but for the amount of light it produces it actually seems the lowest value of the three.

What do you guys think would be the best option?

 

[DrRob]

First reef is probably too blue for a planted tank. I'd generally try to stay at 10k and below.

Cheap one is simple some 5050 tape made up into a strip with a power supply, there are a couple of people on the forum who've set a few of these up and posted in the hardware section, but I can't recall seeing any specific summaries of how they've done over time, maybe worth scouring a few of those posts.

Third one has been around for a while, it seems to have been brought in to replace T8's with high efficiency tubes so you're right, it isn't as bright.

 

[chrisjd]

Thanks for your help, I think I'm going to look into 5050 leds although not necessarily the ones I linked to. I found some discussion in the hardware section but not conclusion about whether they were bright enough for plants. However I remeber reading in another forum someone did manage to grow plants using just 5050 leds, and since I'll be using them in addition to a T8 bulb hopefully they'll do the job.

 

[DrRob]

I've looked at them. I can see no reason why they shouldn't be able to grow plants, the biggest challenge was working out how many it would take to actually get the light right. An easy enough adjustment with the flexible strip options but a pain if you have to buy multiple drivers.

 

[chrisjd]

Thanks for all your help. For now I have decided not to add any additional light to the tank after all. I have low light plants anyway and they seem to be growing although slowly with just the current light. I am going to try adding Easy Carbo instead to help plant growth and cut down on the algae that I have. If that doesn't work too well then I'll probably upgrade the lights in a couple on months by adding 5050 leds. It's my first tank and I haven't even got fish in it yet so I've decided not to rush out and buy anything else for it yet until I have got fish added and them happy first.