Led Lighting

[ben1987]

The low running costs and temps are attracting me to these. The bloke at my LFS runs his coral tanks off these alone and it did look great.
Specifically looking at the aquaray stuff from TMC, but any experiences apprechiated
cheers

 

[SkiFletch]

LED's are fantastic for keeping corals. Low energy use, rediculous "bulb" life, low heat, tight-spectrum color (to discourage algae), and they're very compact. The only drawback is price as they're still wicked expensive over here. Current recently came out with a 4-lamp model that's only ~$50-75 which is cheap, but still you'd need probably 6-8 of those units per 2' square area, then it becomes not so cheap. My LFS does have an LED only tank with those Current lights and the corals do great in there. Take that FWIW

 

[ben1987]

thanks for the help again ski
Got my stand built and tank Drilled this week.


Aparently the light im looking at can be used as singles on every 2' of water? Id be looking at a pair over my 3' which comes in at £170 or roughly $340
heres a link
[URL="http/www.tmc-ltd.co.uk/aquarium/aquaray-lighting.asp"]http/www.tmc-ltd.co.uk/aquarium/aquaray-lighting.asp[/URL]

They did look good. The LFS i saw them in had one massive coral tank under these alone. He had 6 on it but said there isnt anything that wont grow in it. He also has started a cube display with a single and i must admit it did look really healthy, massive corals and great colours.

Also if i didnt go for LED's the tank would only be 14-15" deep so what other lighting would give decent coral options?

cheers, sorry for loads of questions again

 

[SkiFletch]

Tests have shown that a 12w AquaBeam produces up to 33% more illumination at 50cm than a 24w compact fluorescent aquarium fitting

A 24watt compact flourescent really doesn't put out that much light... These sound very similar to the Current USA models available over here with an array of 3watt LEDs. You could try getting away with two of them, but without a PAR meter it's impossible to really say if these will work or not. There isn't a lot of body of experience here for using these things yet as they're still so new so I can't really give you an answer. My oppinion (and this is only an educated guess) is that two of these strips will be enough for lower light corals. Sensitive hard corals may not do well under just two of them, but again that's a total guess.

 

[ben1987]

ok mate, thanks a lot. Really undecided now. I dont think im going to go buy like 6 of them. But il keep going back to check on the LFS tank with a single one and see how thats doing.

 

[andywg]

However!

If you head over to Reef Central you will see that while LEDs are very good, they are not great for "acro-farm" SPS tanks where Metal Halide or decent T5 HO tubes seem to do better.

Some people are using T5 with LED and getting good results.

 

[ben1987]

Thank you...all this planning is making my head hurt