LED Color Combos
 

Just looking for some input from people using colors other than whites and blues in their LED set-ups. I recently purchased a DIY kit. Before I get too involved in building it am wondering if I should be using some greens and reds along with the whites and royal blues.

I actually powered through an entire thread about this subject yesterday on nanoreef called LED Aesthetics. Its mostly for non-dimmable setups where you can't adjust the colors so getting the right balance of led colors are more important. Basically the other colors (Cyan, Red, True Violet) can make certain corals pop, but have to be run at lower power on a dimmer so they dont overwhelm the rest of the tanks color. Also if these colors aren't spaced correctly it can produce a disco ball effect in the tank or leave colored shadows.

Neutral White however appears to blend well with royal blue (3RB:1NW ratio) and leave a warmer color in the tank that isn't overpowered by the royal blue. There are lots of comments that the cool white are too blue for many people although its seems there are many tanks running fine with cool white royal blue combos. It can also depend on the bin number of your leds as two different bin numbers can produce very different colors or temperatures of white so they recommend test building your setup on small scale to determine if you like the color first and then make changes from there. That was just my take on it but there is lots of experimenting with colors and interesting ideas to read on.

Cree Cool Whites are anything BUT too White. They are more warm/yellow. Even the owner of RapidLed agrees....

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh....php?t=2089818

the debate on this is not how they look, but rather the missing wave lenths that are in the nutral white that catch some of the colors of the corals that the cool whites miss.

if I were building a system right now it would be 1 nutral white, to 1 or 2 royal blue and 1 true violet.

Steve

Cool whites are rated at 5000 to 8300, neutral whites are 3700 to 5000. Where are you going to get the 5000 to 8300 wave lengths? I'm curious why you wouldn't use neutral whites and cool whites to catch even more wave lengths?

Yeah, i'm debating breaking out the soldering gun again and possibly mixing in a couple neutral whites just to catch some more wave length. Also considering supplementing in a t5 fiji purple for the reds.

When I recently built my LED fixture, I read through that nano reef thread mentioned above. They recommended having all four main colours, rb, nw, cw and normal blues. If going with one colour of white, they recommend nw's over cw's, with the nw's and rb's in a 1:2 ratio. Not sure how important it is to have nw's over the cw's but supposedly you get a wider spectrum that way.

The normal blues are more of a baby blue colour (whereas rb's are slightly purple) and I've noticed some corals pop more with the blues on as well. You only need a few of them, as they are very overpowering and easily give the whole tank a baby blue colour (unless you like that colour).

The misc. colours (cyan, red, violet, etc) seemed too difficult to add in effectively as the drawbacks seem to outweigh the benefits. Adding those in might be overkill IMO.

2:1 royal blue to neutral white is the way to go and you can supplement with True Violet to get some good growth.

Steve. My comment was a reply to jfish stating that many ppl find the cool white LEDs too blue.....

Does this look too blue?
http://i908.photobucket.com/albums/a.../PremVSReg.png

These are two different bins of coolwhite XP-G ...but them both seem warm white to me. Cool white should be straight white.

Here is the RC link... http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh....php?t=2072326

ok, your confusing final kelvin equivalent with spectrum. I am talking spectrum. so lets look at a royal blue vs a blue. they both have a peak of about 430nm and they both have small spikes in the 430 to 520 rang also. the blue has more in the secondary range than the royal blue does so the resultant kelvin equivalent is higher.

also they don't have a range of 3700 to 5000 what they mean is some bins will have a 3700 rating, some bins will have a 4000 rating and some bins will have a 5000 rating.. other bins are different. so the bin of led is also very important.

same with the whites, a nutral white will still have wavelengths in the whole range but the amounts will be different than in the cool white. Kelvin is just the perceved color output to our eye which is a combanation of all the different wavelenghts the source emits.

go to page 5 of this PDF to see the spectral chart for the three white leds and you can see what I mean
http://www.cree.com/products/pdf/xlamp7090xr-e.pdf

Steve