I also thought of this possibility when I got back into reefing about 2 years ago. i found a decent source for this stuff and I even bought a few items to experiment with, ie: strips of LED's and some arrays that replace regular bulbs. It is very difficult to compare them to MH or PC bulbs. One of these bulbs that is supposed to replace a 75 watt lightbulb looked very feeble over my 20 gallon tank. You would need dozens of them to get enough output. From an energy usage perspective, LEDs will be a tremendous savings over anything else out there, which is probably why a european company is developing the system. One other benefit of LED's is that they are inherintly focused in one direction. There would be no need for reflectors with LED's. This is one of the reasons LED's are difficult to compare with regular bulbs which shine in all directions. A group of LED's that are facing the same direction put a virtual beem of light with an arc of 10to 50 degrees. Wider the spread, the more diluted the light. From a cost perspective, at the current time they are extremely expensive. My rough calculation (very rough mind you) would be that instead of a 2x250watt HQI setup, I would need at least $4000 plus worth of LED's. Even then, I'm now doubtful that the LED's would have provided enough intesity. Also, the white and blue spectrum LED's don't have the same life expectency that the red ones do. Red can easily last 100,000 hours. The salesman I bought my stuff from was hesitant to estimate how long the white/blue ones would last, but he implied that it would be 10-50k hours. I think that LED's are promising, but you would lose the glitter lines and the price needs to improve by a lot to be competitive in this country. If they can make them larger, that would also help a lot. I'll be watching with interest.
SM! Ill bet we were posting and responsing at the exact same time...Milton, another reef aquarist on this board has found an awesome LED light fixture from Lowes that was meant to house an "Exit" sign display and lite it with red LED's. One could easily extract the red ones (or put them on a separate feed) and replace with the blue/white ones mentioned earlier and have a fully-working nano reef light. At least they have built the housing, installed correct resistance for the power supply voltage, and got the bulb receptacles wired and ready. I think if I were to do another, Id use Miltons idea of the exit sign and just buy 20 or so blue bulbs from RadioClap.
Milt, still havent seen them at the store but I found them online! Lazy shoppers dream... it is a perfect retrofit idea for a small tank. Good one.
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but, if that company wants to sell them at a reasonable price with the right bulbs Id be willing to wait until '04 to get them. It will be THE hot new item when it comes out in full swing I guarantee ya. Once again, great thought material GOCS.
Brandon
brandon429":29gnupsc said:
My pleasure Brandon - Yeah even though I'm not shopping now, I occasionally tune into that website & others to see "what's new"... Like I said if they can pull this off & do so at a decent price this'll really be a big leap for our hobby (as lighting is the suckiest part of all when it comes to reef equipment setup, maint, & energy usage).
Now I may be wrong on this one, but if I recall UV is destructive and the flourescent pigments found in corals is designed to reflect that away from the tissues where it causes free-radical degredation, just like in humans. If Im not mistaken, flourescence prevents coral sunburns...this idea is open to change in my head if its not right but this is what I remember reading somewhere.
Brandon
Brandon
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