chinese led lights

[Silkyslim]

Plumcrazy how high off the water do you have your light.

[BigAirHarper]

Originally Posted by dojic60

I purchased 2 the same light fixtures 2 months ago. One is 24" and one 36" with 3w Cree led. They works exenlence. They have service In New York . I paid For both $900 with shipping.

Ooo could you post some pics of your tank?

Also, how does the controller feature work for you? Are you able to successfully slowly increase the intensity of the lights? Thanks!

Oh and Plumb, your lights are looking real good.

[donald altman]

Originally Posted by Eshine Robin

So may I ask what sepctrum do you think is great for SPS growing? we all know most companies sell the led aquarium light at 50% 455nm blue and 50% 12000K white. is there something wrong with that? for CREE xpg leds, the max color temperature is 9000K, there is still no more than 9000K for CREE leds, and for Bridgelux leds, people could choose 12000K, 14000K, even 20000K cool white. So what spectrum configuration do you think is great for corals?

There is no perfect spectrum.. The LED systems limit you on the spectrum you can have over your tank period. However each bulb in a "traditional style fixture" can be used to custom tune to your coral and to your viewing preference.. an LED system cannot do this.. once you purchase it and turn it on thats what it is. IF I had to limit my whole tank to only two spectrums scratch that one kelvin temp and have some blue moon lights added in I'd be sad

[Plumbcrazy]

Originally Posted by Silkyslim

Plumcrazy how high off the water do you have your light.

!2" off the water.

[Plumbcrazy]

Originally Posted by donald altman

There is no perfect spectrum.. The LED systems limit you on the spectrum you can have over your tank period. However each bulb in a "traditional style fixture" can be used to custom tune to your coral and to your viewing preference.. an LED system cannot do this.. once you purchase it and turn it on thats what it is. IF I had to limit my whole tank to only two spectrums scratch that one kelvin temp and have some blue moon lights added in I'd be sad

That is not what the thread is about. It was started to see if anyone had experience with lower cost leds. You are correct with a "traditional" light you can pick what colors look more appealing to the eye. Leds are a lot like mh, pick the color appealing to your eye and run with it. Good luck with the heat. If you run t5, now your talking $$$ for bulb replacement. Just look at leds as going green!

[Detroit_306]

Originally Posted by Plumbcrazy

!2" off the water.

How deep is your tank?

[BigCountry74]

Originally Posted by Plumbcrazy

!2" off the water.

Is that 2 or 12? I hope 12....I was planning on mounting mine 10. If I have to to 2" that screws up everything..lol

[kotu100]

Originally Posted by kotu100

for the price that evo fixture looks like a no go, i would get 3 of these $160 ones efore i dropped $500 on a fixture that uses 2w LED's.

Heres my pics of the 120w running 30 blue and 25 white LED's.
link to fixture http://www.ebay.com/itm/Aquarium-Cor...item68c94c7950


Nova Extreme Pro 6x30w
Ati Blue+
Ati Blue +
Ati Purple +
Ati Aquablue Special
Ati Blue +
Ati Blue +

LED fixture White and Blue on


Led fixture Blues only (the colors pop like crazy my camera just wont pick it up)

update on these lights, Growth is good, color is better than t5's. and im getting some pink/red hues popping up in corals that had none before.
Corals on corners of tank on sandbed also showing signs of growth.

No problems with the fixture at all, and it's still running pretty quiet. This this is INTENSE!

[donald altman]

Originally Posted by Plumbcrazy

That is not what the thread is about. It was started to see if anyone had experience with lower cost leds. You are correct with a "traditional" light you can pick what colors look more appealing to the eye. Leds are a lot like mh, pick the color appealing to your eye and run with it. Good luck with the heat. If you run t5, now your talking $$$ for bulb replacement. Just look at leds as going green!

The heat on a t5 system? LOL

My reply was to a question made in this thread.
Spectrum and color choices in LED lighting is totally relevant.

These systems haven't been used long enough to give a good long term opinion of how they perform.

I personally would be interested in LEDs with multiple kelvin ranges within the same panel.

The bulbs might last but the rest of these fixtures IMHO is going to do like all the rest of the cheap plastic stuff made in China.


...I don't seet buying a light made in China that was shipped to the US as being "green". Sure it might be cheaper to operate, I'll give you that, but a true "green" one would be made here in the US out of mostly post recycled material. I guess every bit helps though.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against LEDs.. I just don't think they are the answer for MY tank YET.

Eventually all the LEDs will be better quality and might make great lights, we've already seen a fair amount of advances. You can get affordable optics and dimmable LEDs now... I've seen that you can get color shifting LED bulbs now as well for other things maybe they will make their way into our hobby. I'm sure alot more of these features will be standard before long. When they are fully proven I'll have some over my reef.

[kotu100]

To all you guys that are against these "china" LED's

How much does it cost to buy budget MH fixture, now how often do you have to replace the bulb(s). twice a year. thats about $100-$120 a year just on bulbs.
I could replace this LEd fixture every 2 years for that price and i'd still be saving money.

As for the color, you still have to supplement MH lighting, so why not supplement LED?
Or even solder in a couple diff color LED's in place of blue or white that come with the fixture.

Running this fixture for a bit over a month now i can easily say theres really nothing on the market that can touch these fixtures for price, color, growth, size, and availability.
Prove me wrong.

[TropTrea]

Originally Posted by Plumbcrazy

That is not what the thread is about. It was started to see if anyone had experience with lower cost leds. You are correct with a "traditional" light you can pick what colors look more appealing to the eye. Leds are a lot like mh, pick the color appealing to your eye and run with it. Good luck with the heat. If you run t5, now your talking $$$ for bulb replacement. Just look at leds as going green!

I will disagree with LED's not being tunable to your color preference. But unfortunately most commercial ones are not unless you spend big money.

On a do it yourself fixture you can easily tune the lighting to your personal taste and even change it if you get boared with a particular look. There are Neutral White LED's that create a 5,000 K effect as well as both Blue and Royal Blue LED's. Besides this there are also Near UV Leads that duplicate the old Atinic 420 nm light bulbs. Running a ration of about 1 Neutral White to 6 Royal Blues will give you an effect similar to most commercial 20,000K light bulbs. If you put the Royal Blues on a dimmable driver you can reduce the amount of blue you have have even get back down to the 6,500K level. Another thing you can do is run a 1 to 1 ration of royal blues to neutral whites but put the neutral whites on a dimmable driver. Then when your lights come on you have a very dramatic all Royal Blue effect but slowly increase the intensity of the white as the tank gets brighter it slowly will move through the Kelvin spectrum to give you a 10,000K look at mid day.

Yes you can do wonders with LED's even things you could not do with conventional lights. I have a pre-dawn post dusk strip of Royal Blues that are on the front of my tank angled at a 45 degree angle to the rear. In the pre dawn hours it creates a shimmer look as it amplifies ever disturbance on the water surface throughout the tank. Try doing that with T-5's, or even Metal Hides.

With some extremely tall tanks you have multiple options with lenses on your LED's as well. One big issue with most lighting is that on the surface you could be burning your corals while on the substrate level of a tall tank you may barely have enough light to grow soft corals. With lens you can reduce the difference in lighting levels fantastical with the use of lenses.

Every day LED's are improving. The LED's Cree produced 2 years ago are obsolete today. New more powerfully and more efficient LED's are being released almost a daily bases right now. Commercial manufacturers have to go through periods of testing and market evaluations before they make them available to us. But the Do it Yourselfer's have the newest technology available to them today. And when something newer and better comes out they can simply modify there existing system rather than have to buy a whole new system to take advantage of the savings.

To me what it gets down to is how much do value your time? Are you willing to spend spend 4 hours to build your own lighting system or $300 that exceeds anything out there on the market today that would cost your $600 to $1,000 for a large tank. Sure if your talking a small 20 gallon tank the savings are not as drastic but but your still going to be ahead of the commercial market.

[TropTrea]

Originally Posted by kotu100

To all you guys that are against these "china" LED's

How much does it cost to buy budget MH fixture, now how often do you have to replace the bulb(s). twice a year. thats about $100-$120 a year just on bulbs.
I could replace this LEd fixture every 2 years for that price and i'd still be saving money.

As for the color, you still have to supplement MH lighting, so why not supplement LED?
Or even solder in a couple diff color LED's in place of blue or white that come with the fixture.

Running this fixture for a bit over a month now i can easily say theres really nothing on the market that can touch these fixtures for price, color, growth, size, and availability.
Prove me wrong.

If your comparing them to T-5's and Metal Hides yes your right. But when you compare them to home built LED system your completly playing in an oblolute ball park. With the new LED's out there today you build a home made system with 30 LED's that will put out more light than any comercial system could 6 months ago with 90 LED's. There are LED's out there today that pu oput 120 lums per watt and can be safely run at 5 Watts while most comercial fixtures are using leds that produce 60 to 70 lums per watt and are running in the 2.5 Watt range per LED.

Look at this fixture It would no problem creating something simular today for a fraction of the cost.

[Tonynlo]

My quick review:

Picked up 3 of the $160 taotronics models for my 125. I'm not sure if it's the nature of LED lighting, but I had a 6x54 sunpower over a 6 ft tank and it was brighter looking. I have not tested the par yet. Coral all seems to be doing well and have noticed growth decent PE on some of my SPS. The actinic lighting from the LED is impressive! The fixture itselt feels cheap, power cords don't plug in all the way and if they wiggle a bit you can lose the connection. If you are hanging them, good luck trying to keep them straight. They spin and blow around because of the fan and the stiff power cords. Be careful when you are installing the lights. After I hung the light up, I plugged in the blue sides of each fixture to see what it looked like. There seems to be a connection between the plugs. I plugged the cord into the white socket on the fixture and when i grabbed the plug to put it into the wall, I caught 110V. My shoulder still hurts... Keep in mind that you really are getting what you paid for. An entry level, disposable light.

[Boxfish]

Originally Posted by TropTrea

To me what it gets down to is how much do value your time? Are you willing to spend spend 4 hours to build your own lighting system or $300 that exceeds anything out there on the market today that would cost your $600 to $1,000 for a large tank. Sure if your talking a small 20 gallon tank the savings are not as drastic but but your still going to be ahead of the commercial market.

Dennis I agree with you on building your own and I do have the time and could do it easy. But to do it for 300? Show me where. Ive called around and to build it out of the nice cree's and make it tunable etc. Just to cover my 62 by 18 by 27 tank every one tells me its like 1000 to 1400 bucks.
Show me show me show me where I can get this stuff for 300!

[rrasco]

You would be hard pressed to build one for $300 for a larger tank. I'm close to $1K into my 108 LED unit for my 210 (72x24x30). Some things could have been cheaper, but I didn't want to cut corners at the end. Still much cheaper than going off the shelf.

[BigCountry74]

Originally Posted by Boxfish

Dennis I agree with you on building your own and I do have the time and could do it easy. But to do it for 300?

X2. I could handle buying the LEDs/heatsink etc. But the dimmable drivers were just too $ for me.

[donald altman]

I would think just around the corner would be a LED fixture that would have a chip you could plug into your pc and program the LED to come on at different times and to dim over a certain time period or even to color shift.

It would be nice if you could literally walk over plug a laptop in and make an adjustment to the look of your tank... the technology is already being used for other applications
(stage lighting and such) using a DMX-512 controller.

[rrasco]

Originally Posted by donald altman

I would think just around the corner would be a LED fixture that would have a chip you could plug into your pc and program the LED to come on at different times and to dim over a certain time period or even to color shift.

It would be nice if you could literally walk over plug a laptop in and make an adjustment to the look of your tank... the technology is already being used for other applications
(stage lighting and such) using a DMX-512 controller.

That's entirely possible, but with already expensive LED fixtures, it would just drive the cost up even more. When I build my controller I plan to use an Arduino with ethernet capabilities. Hopefully I can run a web server which will allow me to add features you mentioned. I actually work for a stage lighting company, so it will be interesting to see how much cross-over there is. One of my bosses is already ordering a bunch of LED so we can start building some LED ribbons, fixtures, etc, to test out. Partially sparked by the fact I'm messing with all this LED stuff for my tank.

[BigCountry74]

Dude heck yeah.....

[Plumbcrazy]

The lights are 12". Off the tank the tank is 14" deep. The heat issue was with mh but my 6 bulb t5 raised the tank 2 degrees. I'm just stating that for 160 bucks these LEDs can't be beat. Now if your not ready for these advancements on your tank then stick to "traditional" lighting.

These lights are just a stepping stone for what's to come and we are all taking a risk by running them. Five years from now when these "should" need replaced then new and better stuff will be out. Someone took the risk on t5s once apron a day and look where they are at.

Granted they are not made of recycled materials, the still need replaced less often, and use less engery. IMO that going green, also without the heat issues of other lighting no need for a chiller huh just saved more engery.

[Boxfish]

Hey Plumbcrazy thanks for all you go info and post your really helping mae make up my mine. Im now debating between 14k and 20k. But its hard to tell from the pics take a look at GroYurOwn's on page 16 he says thats a pretty close pic. Yours have a hint of blue and thats what Im looking for I just dont like a straight white look. But his 20k lights look nice also. What are your thoughts on your pic accuracy. Also Im going to need 3 lights if I did 2 14k and 1 20k in the middle how would that look would it blend? Nah know that I think about it Id probably have a big blue spot in the middle of the tank. Anyway your thoughts

[TropTrea]

Originally Posted by rrasco

That's entirely possible, but with already expensive LED fixtures, it would just drive the cost up even more. When I build my controller I plan to use an Arduino with ethernet capabilities. Hopefully I can run a web server which will allow me to add features you mentioned. I actually work for a stage lighting company, so it will be interesting to see how much cross-over there is. One of my bosses is already ordering a bunch of LED so we can start building some LED ribbons, fixtures, etc, to test out. Partially sparked by the fact I'm messing with all this LED stuff for my tank.

It is not around the corner but it is here now. Many people running APEX controlers have there LED's hooked up to them. They are using dimmable drivers with seperate channels for each color. Then the controler turns them on to there desired brightness gradualy. Each color controled seperatly you can start with a predawn beep blue look and gradualy lighten it to a dawn 20,000K look and then gradualy turn it up to a much brighter 14,000K look at mid day. Besides that they can give a moon light effect tuned to the actual moon cycle.

If you already have an APEX controler it is basicly just a matter of getting dimmable Drivers for a Home Built LED system, or watching which comercial system you get which has the features already built into them.

[rrasco]

Originally Posted by TropTrea

It is not around the corner but it is here now. Many people running APEX controlers have there LED's hooked up to them. They are using dimmable drivers with seperate channels for each color. Then the controler turns them on to there desired brightness gradualy. Each color controled seperatly you can start with a predawn beep blue look and gradualy lighten it to a dawn 20,000K look and then gradualy turn it up to a much brighter 14,000K look at mid day. Besides that they can give a moon light effect tuned to the actual moon cycle.

If you already have an APEX controler it is basicly just a matter of getting dimmable Drivers for a Home Built LED system, or watching which comercial system you get which has the features already built into them.

I know, but I thought he was referring to all-inclusive fixtures with those capabilities. At least that's what I was talking about.

[Plumbcrazy]

Originally Posted by Boxfish

Hey Plumbcrazy thanks for all you go info and post your really helping mae make up my mine. Im now debating between 14k and 20k. But its hard to tell from the pics take a look at GroYurOwn's on page 16 he says thats a pretty close pic. Yours have a hint of blue and thats what Im looking for I just dont like a straight white look. But his 20k lights look nice also. What are your thoughts on your pic accuracy. Also Im going to need 3 lights if I did 2 14k and 1 20k in the middle how would that look would it blend? Nah know that I think about it Id probably have a big blue spot in the middle of the tank. Anyway your thoughts

I would have to say that mine are really close to a hamilton 14k mh. Not as blue as a phenix 14k but I love the color. I'm a 20k guy at heart but the growth and all around color of a 14k is cool. I have a friend who has the 20k fixture and he says it's a little bluer than his coral vue 20k. I haven't seen this in person so can't verify it. The only thing I can verify is what I see on my tank, I will be tanking a trip to his house next month though.

[karsseboom]

Originally Posted by Plumbcrazy

That is not what the thread is about. It was started to see if anyone had experience with lower cost leds. You are correct with a "traditional" light you can pick what colors look more appealing to the eye. Leds are a lot like mh, pick the color appealing to your eye and run with it. Good luck with the heat. If you run t5, now your talking $$$ for bulb replacement. Just look at leds as going green!

Going green? Lol this whole hobby is Totally against going green man.