I'm going to take the plunge in LED's for 3 of my planted tanks, hoping to get some advice. Been reading alot about the Finnex on here and that seems to be one route alot of people are choosing. I came across a post on my local fish forum from someone who purchased LED floodlights from China. This company doesn't specialize in aquariums, just regular lights. He posted a video of his reef tank here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0otFIEkWzw&feature=youtu.be&hd=1
You don't have to hang them that high, If it's right on the tank, then you won't need to do anything, if it's a few inches above, you might want to build a reflector shroud kind of like I did to shunt the stray light downward. Hilde is right tho, they are wide angle (120 I think).
Awesome thanks. I plan on wiring this up and getting the tank in the rack this weekend I guess for now I will drop it right on top it's got to be better than the desk lamp cfl combo I have.
I wired it up it. It seems that my one cfl puts off more light I think I'm gonna need two of these lights per a tank
Tapatalk is not allowing me to post a pics but I don't even think this one light will be enough to grow anything
I I could probably fab something up out I aluminum then polish it but I'm not sure I need more light I kind of like it the way it is
The bottom tanks will be high light tanks I may use 20w led flood lights on those and just use screen to filter it. Or I may just blast them with light co2 and ferts. They will be fishless. So I can push the limits and see how fast I can get plants to grow
I just think that would help make more even spread of light in the tank. To make it brighter you would need to make a parabolic reflector. Anyway hoppy has a thread different media for reflection. I tested them using a par meter and found that white paint is a good reflector.
On my riparium I have 2 t5ho bulbs in a Hagen glo fixture it is elevated about 20" off the surface I'm thinking I may try to replace it with a 20w LFL (led floodlight) any input?
I think it work for you have low light. Just seems the high you hand the flood light the more spread you have. For I have 10 in over a 29G tank without a reflector and the spread of the light is 18 feet.
Interesting how it doesn't appear as bright as CFL, but then it has more lux. I don't have a lux meter, but I do have a solar fan I made by cutting up a solar powered fan hat, and it will not turn on when you put it up to a CFL bulb, but if you put it under my LED floodlight, it goes, under my metal halide, it goes. Lets face it, fluorescent is great technology when you want to throw light all over to illuminate a room, but when you want a substitute for sunshine, not just from a grow some plants stand point, but from an aesthetics standpoint as well-it falls short.
That's good to know I have a couple of those fans. I wanted to use them under my t5ho but even with all 4 on they don't work. I will have to try one out under my led
On my riparium I have 2 t5ho bulbs in a Hagen glo fixture it is elevated about 20" off the surface I'm thinking I may try to replace it with a 20w LFL (led floodlight) any input?
I tested a 10w led flood lamp on a 5.5g and it was somewhat disappointing. The lighting was nearly thoughs lightly less than what I am seeing using a 26w 6500k cfl using a clamp light fixture. Again, I'll have to post photos this morning.
Both pics also include the glass top for which the lamps were placed and floaters on the surface of the tank. I have a pair of 20w led floods which I planned on using on my 55 g but may go to the 40 w now ....
I'd go for the highest wattage your budget allows, although you would probably get the most watts per dollar through multiple or bulk 10W fixtures. You can always deploy some floaters or raise it up if it's too much light. Look forward to seeing the pics acitydweller.
I've got a 10W round model on the way (6500k)-looks pretty snazzy. One ebay listing said it is submersible-not that I'm going to do that. I'm going to put it over my emersed grow bed on my 20L.
This is the one, allegedly yields 900 lumens (I didn't go for the RGB with remote that costs 10 bucks more):
I want to see this one hooked up. Once you get it going could you tell us how the light spread is? I'm looking for something with a tight beam so that it doesn't spill out all over the living room. I also like my tank to have dark edges.
I'm also wondering if the RGB model will allow you to mix the colors to produce white? I'd like to turn my tank blue sometimes. :icon_redf
The light intensity certainly is greater on the Flood but the difference becomes more evident once you raise the fixture 1 and 2 inches.
The CFL lamp actually improved the spread without loss to the intensity of the light downward whereas the LED flood dramatically became dimmer directly below the lamp itself when raised.
IN fairness, 30% of the water surface is covered by floaters so this isnt a true representation of the lamp but its what i could muster last night near midnight with my camera phone.
can you (and HEINEKIN357) please post the ebay id from which you bought it? I'm really interested in these for my med-high light 40gB but I'm afraid to make a bad purchase
Depends what light level you want. If you want to be in the high light realm-to be safe, with a deeper tank, I'd go with fewer of the higher wattage fixtures-As I'd assume they can get better depth penetration. If you want high light I'd probably stick to the 20W and above fixtures on a tank of that depth. One light of 50W or more could look pretty sick.
The LED does look brighter. Since almost all the light is coming directly from the chip in the LED, it will be blocked out more effectively by floaters. In the CFL the photons are being reflected down pretty evenly below the whole 6-8" reflector.
You can't really get par numbers from Lumens, you might be able to convert it to Lux, however once you start passing it through water, all bets are off. Your best bet if you want to make sense of Lumen data(which can vary widely from ebay listing to ebay listing..i.e. is often wrong) would be to look up the lumen output of an LED fixture we have par data on it, and compare it to that. But-it is far more useful than wattage when estimating how bright a light will be (unless the lumen data is wrong, then you have to use the watts).
I may just have to bite the bullet and buy a par meter it would make things very nice for me. Anyone have any ideas where I can get on mildly cheap, like +\- 100$ ?
There are some with plugs but you have to really scrounge for them, and you can get them in spectrums over 5000k, The 10w jumps from 13 bucks to around 25 with the plug, so double. I was able to get a 30W with plug for 45 bucks.
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