Steve I'm with you on this one. How can a small LED give off enough light to sustain the amount of intense lighting. I could may be see it working on a small tank. like 10" deep. But to see have a tank 24-30" to give off that much light. Sure the light is there but to allow SPS to grow or LPS you would need lots and lots of LEDs.

LED technology has come a long way. I sell LED flashlights and they are very very bright. Perhaps they are using the "luxeon" LED 's which are 10 X as bright as a regular LED. I use one for looking into my tank at night and believe me it is bright. If you had lots of them as I would suspect they would, it would light up a pretty large area.

Hey Greg why seeing as you sell them why don't you duct tape a whole wack of them together, hang them over your tank and thell us how they work!:lol: :razz: Just kidding around. In all seriousness I hope it does work not only would it be a cool thing to control the white/blue ratio but also the moneythat could be saved on power and replacement of bulbs.

It would probably save on power and the hassle of bulb replacement. I doubt they would be cheap, especially to start off with. For example the luxeon LED flashlight I was reffering to, about the size of a mag light, retails for $70.

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It would take you a long time to justify purchasing an LED array. They are still quite expensive to the consumer. I don't think that the LED fixture shown in the pics above have nearly enough to compare to MH, maybe double or tripple that amount.

I guess we'll see once there is more testing done on them. If PFO is releasing information on their progress already, it suggests to me it has commercial viability already.

And even if for now it is just for shallower tanks, that could make a big difference for fish stores and frag grow-out tanks to save on electricity and bulb replacement cost.

Obviously this is assuming that there is some economies of scale as the technology goes from only early adopters to maintstream folk.

Just sorta in answer to the question about lux further back, the thing is lux is really just a measure of intensity but not a measure of PAR (photosynthetically active radiation). What would be really interesting to see would be the PAR outputs of that unit. e.g., a halogen bulb is really bright but wouldn't be very useful over a reef tank due to the spectrum. (You don't even see halogen's used as plant grow lights.) So I think the long-term viability of the unit will depend on what ppfd/PAR comes out of it. Anyhow that's what I think would be interesting to see.

yes it is, but it tells us nothing of the quality of the light. there is only a specific band of light that is usable for photosynthis and that is what is important to us.

Snappy, we had a guy on here that was going to send me a luxton star and driver "on loan" for me to run PAR tests as he was claiming how good they were and that he was going to start producing a LED lighting system.. well in short I sent my address he said they were on the way.. 8 months laiter still nothing.

I do have a PAR sensor and have tested normal LED's very disapointing PAR output. less than 1/20th of a NO actinic bulb, so going by that if a luxton is 10X more powerfull we should still only see 1/2 of the output of a NO tube, but it would take about 5 luxtons to cover the same area.. and at 20.00 a pop it wouldn't be a cheaper method of lighting..

so if anyone has a luxton and driver they could spare for a week or two I will do tests and get some comparitive figures instead of speculation.

Steve

Those bulbs would be insaine in price......Hey you calgary people.....you know those blue lights in marlborough mall in the roof.....Those are led lights......Guess how much for one bulb!!!

Answer $240 smackers!!!!!(and I know cause me and 7 others did the electrical reno at that mall.........9 months of night shift..I will never forget)