PFO LED lighting
 

I saw a brochure at Safari yesterday for these - pretty pricey... BUT imagine not having to replace bulbs and the overall energy savings! If anyone's getting one of these puppies, let me know... I want to see with my own eyes!

http://www.solarisled.com/

Oh noooo! I just got my tank set up with T5s, but this looks really cool :biggrin: Couldn't see the price on that page, did you get a price quote on it?

48" 20K Solaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet. Solaris-G-48-20K $2325
60" 20K Solaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet. Solaris-G-60-20K $2896
72" 20K Solaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet. Solaris-G-72-20K $3344


:0

LEd
 

Ill Get Two!!!

Cool, grab a couple for me while your at it. :wink:

And they have smaller ones also...

14" 20K Solaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet Solaris-G-14-20K $849
24" 20KSolaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet. Solaris-G-24-20K $1308
36" 20K Solaris LED Illumination System. Supplied with Control Modular and Mounting Feet. Solaris-G-36-20K $1878

I'll wait untill they've been out for a good while before jumping in and getting one. I'd wonder if the LED's are replacable (Since the smallest unit will have at least 50 of them.), or is the whole unit just disposable and not servicable?

On the other hand.............. If someone wants to give me one, I won't say no! :lol:

I read the stats, the LEDs are in pack of 5 per. if 1 led burns out you have to replace that bunch.

At a 50,000 hour life cycle who gives a $%%#@$ if they're replaceable or not? That's 11 1/2 years at 12 hours a day... at say $100 a bulb, (ya right!), replaced yearly would be $2200 ALONE over the life of the fixture... factor in 40% energy & heat savings... couple THAT with reduced chiller & AC costs... I'm tellin' ya... if these grow corals and make my water shimmer I'm in! :mrgreen:

AND you can actually shift the colour temp as well... built in timers & storm simulators... imagine where this hobby would be if nobody ever thought outside the box... :razz:

I totally agree with you Reeferaddict, but as G1GY says, will wait for at least 6 months and let other people reveiw it first.:wink:
Besides they will always drop in price after the first year when the "New & Improved" model comes out.:lol:

I would like to see PAR output levels at different distances, ie. at 1 foot, at 2. foot and at say 3 foot (just for thepeople with the realy deep tanks) as well as with the type of bulb, age of bulb, and type and age of ballast.

when they say "The current design produces PAR light output levels equal to a 250W MH 20K. " well what brand 20K, what brand ballast, .. I can put togeather a 20K set up that will give you less PAR than a 10000K PC set up, so it is a very easy bit of advertising to manipulate.

as far as the energy savings.. I thik that realy sucks when you think about it.. only 40% better than a 250 MH set up.. so lets see that would save me about 36 bucks a year. I am looking at a 36" modle for my tank at about 1900 bucks US so Island price will probably be about 3K after shipping, tax, exchange, ect.. so I have a complet set up for 500.00 with bulb changes every 18 months, thats about 600 bucks over 10 years in bulb changes. now power is about 15 bucks a month for my lights if that but I will be generous so that will come to 1800.00 for a grand total of 2900.00 for 10 years.

lets look at the LED, to start we are about 3K to buy.. we will say there are no faulty bulbs and they all last 10 years (good luck.. I will say you are probably going to have to replace 10% befor that and they will be expensive but we can't guess on that right now) power is 40% less than MH so if I got 1800 for power on my MH that means I should be about 1080.00 for power for 10 years on the LEDs. so with out bulb changes we are at 4080.00 hmm a grand more..

Steve

I couldn't agree more - even PFO says within a year these fixtures will actually cost LESS than a MH setup... I'm just excited about someone taking the plunge with this new technology that has been on the horizon for 3 years now... I will want to see results before I even think about ordering one... if you look at PFO's gallery, the display tank looks like nothing special.

Steve - LED's have no filaments to burn out, and run considerably cooler than HID, so it's not just the 40%, but also the other energy costs. During the warm months here I have both AC and the chiller, I get to watch my hydro meter spin around like it's getting ready for take off. As for the PAR values, they're all charted on PFO's site, and their tests show comparably with what they claim... I guess we'll have to wait for them to ship and people to use them for 6 months to a year before we can have any unbiased opinions based on real world testing. A 400W equivalent is in the works to be released later this year. As for the 10% replacement over the life of the fixture I guess only time will tell - but I DO remember the hype a couple of years back about "dead pixel" issues with LCD monitors and longevity issues with those which have since fallen by the wayside. I can't imagine a company putting a foot forward without having done its due diligence, and what could be a bigger nightmare for a company than to have problems as you have described? Having dealt with PFO directly before, I am confident that the stated life of the product is actually much less than the actual expected life. Most LED's are stated to have a 100,000 hour life expectancy. The one thing that IS of concern is their estimate that the fixtures will only retain 70% of it's PAR over the life of the product - whether this is caused by dead LED's or what have you... 30% light loss is something easily rectified by our standard fixtures of today...

I was thinking the same thing. Not only that but the picture quality blows. The least they could do is take some crisp, clear photos of the tanks and corals. Nonetheless, this is very interesting and I too am looking forward to seeing results.

Another downfall I see is that "The LEDs can be set up for either a maximum color temperature of 20K or 12K at time of order.".

Whith Halides you can just buy a new bulb and make the change any time you want to.

yes there will be some issues solved but don't throw away your chiller yet, the luxton stars and other high power LEDs do throw off a lot of heat. as you know a LEDs is a dioed and the product of light is heat. because the little 5mm LEDs produced so little light they also produced little heat, but the High power LEDs (1 to 5watt) do chuck out a bunch of heat. will it be less than a MH... yes but I wouldn't even try to guess if it will be 2/3s the amount or what.. what I do know is that if they put out the same amount of light (PAR doesn't matter) you are going to get the exact same amount of radiation heat from the light its self. Now power venting might take care of the heat from these or it might not, so when you buy one let us know.



Can you send me a link, I looked for a while and didn't find anything.

Maybe I overstated when I said PAR... and understandeably these guys are going to show off test results that PROMOTE their product to be sure...

http://www.solarisled.com/FAQTechnic...1/Default.aspx

http://www.solarisled.com/FAQTechnic...0/Default.aspx

http://www.solarisled.com/FAQTechnic...9/Default.aspx

Steve, read my posts - I did not say I was rushing out to buy one right away. I would like to see some real world tests before I go spend my kids college fund to have the latest fancy light over my aquarium. I have the greatest amount of respect for your knowledge and wisdom in particular, but if we don't embrace new technology, all of us would still be wondering why our 5th anemone in a year died under our NO flourescent lighting... I don't think we'll see landfills with mountains of chillers in them for quite some time, but this is exciting technology to me... maybe not tomorrow, but I think within 5 - 7 years we may all be looking back wondering how we managed our reefs with the technology we have today. If not with products like this then with products we haven't yet imagined... Even since I have entered the hobby, the technological advances have been staggering. If nobody is at least curious then we stagnate.

C1GY said,

"Another downfall I see is that "The LEDs can be set up for either a maximum color temperature of 20K or 12K at time of order.".

Whith Halides you can just buy a new bulb and make the change any time you want to."

My interpretation from PFO's literature is this...

You can buy a fixture with a maximum Kelvin rating of either 13 or 20K that have the same par value. When you adjust the Kelvin rating through the fancy computer controller, it dims or turns off some of the blue LED's making the fixture adjustable between 6500K and the maximum (13K or 20K), of the fixture. You LOSE PAR doing this obviously, but higher Kelvin bulbs typically have lower PAR ratings, so in effect this works in reverse. One thing you can't do is get a 20K bulb to fire like a 10K bulb and vice versa... :mrgreen:

LED lighting is the way of the future without a shadow of a doubt. Highway and city crews have been converting traffic lights to LED for over 5 years now with good reason - energy savings, overall brightness, and by the time the LED's need to be changed, the people that originally installed them will most likely be dead. (Commercial traffic LED's are reported to have a 50 year life cycle - too bad they haven't been around for 50 years to test this :wink: ) Automakers are putting them in for exterior lights as well.

I think I'm gonna email PFO about a marketing job now... haha!

I know I was just trying to help you to make up your mind so you can stop by here on the way home with it and let me play with my measuring tools:mrgreen:


I am sure some one will buy one then we can find out.. but I was talking to a certain person at a store and we think the cost of them is going to make them hard to sell. even if the PAR is as good as a proper MH set up the only people who will spend the money is the ones looking at giesman type setups where they are going to blow a few K on lights anyways.

Steve

That's what I like about you Steve... you can take it almost as good as you give it... :mrgreen: You're another one I want to consult a little with in planning my next project... :lol:

If I decide to jump on board at some time I'll let any of you see it in person.. :idea:

Care to elaborate on that a bit? I think if you compare current flourecent technology to incandecent lights that statement is obviously incorrect. Never mind the differences with solid state lights. They're going to throw heat but nothing like a HID lamp.

because of the efficiency the will be less heat, but how much we don't know.. I do know the luxton stars get so hot they need a heat shield to prevent the LED from burning out and I can only imagine that a 5 watt version would need that also sense a 1 watt version does. so there will be heat thrown out. now sense they use 40% less energy then you are looking at a heat difference of 40% (at least) but how much of this was through the ballast? I would say 1/2 sense I know how hot my ballast get. light is radiation of energy which when comes in contact with a surface will change to heat, the question is how much. weather you have 250 watts of radiant light from a MH or 250 watts of radiant light from and LED it is still the same amount of energy (assuming 100% efficiency) and will have the exact warming effect. now I am only taking about the radiant component, not the convection or conduction types. Convection is the big one that we have a problem with in closed hoods but can be solved with power venting, but you can vent all you want and Radiant heating will not be affected.


so like I said before.. will it run cooler, probably... how much... don't know.

Steve

You don't need heat sinks on luxeon stars because of the amount of heat they produce alone, you need it because of the amount heat it produces compared to the surface area of the device.

The radiant heat transferred by the photons striking a surface is not a significant concern and will almost completely be nullified by evaporation at the water's surface.

The amount of problem heat generated by lighting in aquariums will always be proportional of the efficiency of the light source and the water will be heated by convection. I don't care how many fans you put it a hood with two 150 watt HID lamps, the temperature in the hood will be significantly higher than ambient. Air is a shitty heat conductor and pushing it around with fans doesn't work very well. For example, this is why big transformers are submerged in oil.

Ideally you should be able to touch the surface of one of those LEDs at full power and not hurt yourself. I suspect that either PFO will manage to maintain that kind of surface temp or that the lamp life will suffer significantly. A hot LED is not a happy LED.

While air is not a good heat conductor, you can only saturate a given amount of air with water untill the air can't hold any more. A fan will move the wet air away and allow more dry air to become saturated during evaporation. Without doing this.............. evaporation (and free cooling) stops. (This is in the case of the aquarium itself.)

As far as the fixture itself:

While air itself is not a good conductor, moving it over a heated surface does provide an excellent cost effective vehicle to move heat away from the fixture.

Yes big transformers are filled with with oil for cooling, but the outside of this oil filled gallery is also designed as a heat sink(Largest surface area possible in a given space.) to transfer the heat from the oil to............... You guessed it! Air. :)

I'd really like to see the spectrum of light they put out. Generally LED's have a very narrow frequency band for each colour. I wonder how many different colours they are using in the light.

Halides should have a much broader frequency band.

How exactly does it use 40% less energy?

The new PFO fixture is 300w

This is supposed to be comparable to a 250w MH setup.

Seeing as I pay for electricity by the Kilo-watt-hour, if I run both these fixtures ofr 10 hours a day, won't the PFO cost me MORE?

What am I missing?

From a pure power usage point of view your right, they won't make much of a difference on the electricity bill if ran for the same amount of time. I'm not sure how the MH are rated but assuming that the bulb is using 250W and then assuming the ballast has an 80% efficiency then the actual input power to the MH balast should be around 300W anyway.

MH obviously lose alot more power to heat generation through the light and ballast than LED's. So on a Watt vs Watt basis the LED lighting should produce more light output and less heat output due to it's high efficiency. I'm no lighting expert by any means but what worries me is the narrow spectrum of light produced by LED's.

The 300W LED light should run quite a bit cooler which is a nice bonus.

I'm sure someone else here has a better explanation.

My communication with PFO
 

Thank you for your comments. Our control board is sprayed with a protective coating for saltwater as well as all the circuit boards in the unit. We do not have a heat problem with our units. The maximum inside temperature next to the LED's is 40 Deg C. (The hottest point). Not only are they fan cooled and don't produce the heat of metal halides, they also have an internal RTD unit that will shut the entire unit down if it gets to hot.

Our unit has only 12V dc in the hood not high voltages like it takes to fire metal halide lamps. This continues to reduce the risk of fire and shock.

We are constantly changing/improving the Solaris as well as the new LED fixtures we are developing with feedback from people like you. We appreciate your comments and if you have more please send them to us. For your information, the unit has been almost entirely redesigned since our first showing at the Chicago IMAC because of customer suggestions. The outside may look the same, but the inside is dramatically different.

Thank you,
Patrick Ormiston



Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 5:38 PM
To: Patrick Ormiston
Subject: LED's
Thank you for being first and pushing research forward, I think this light can eliminate all aqua lights in the future,

I have a question/recommendation though, Would you consider moving controlling CPU away from the heat and aquarium top also away from moisture. Looking at Giesemann lights they are catching fire and CPU’s are failing because of overheating. Why not take “Tunze” for example and keep CPU/controller away from aquarium top where it is subjected to harsh environment.

Just my two cents for what it worth

:eek:

Any links to how and why they are catching fire? I just bought a Giesemann Nova II and it hasn't had any problems. Is this a really common problem? Does this happen in the all-in one fixtures? Or in the pendants? :confused:

Sorry to hijack.

I am sure your fixture will be ok , however in all-in one fixtures I hear many are catching fire and / or burning their CPU's because of heat accumulation and especially because of poore step down transformer from 220Volts down to 110. This is done by unquolified tech back East, this is not my place to say who or name the names. All i can tell you can find out more by visiting big "pet shop " on north road and talk to manager he will be able to tell you some more.
the step down transformer is not secured properly in the fixture plus overheat problem and CPU's do not like that.
This is a year old info so I am sure somthing might have been changed and design improved,

Thanks for the reply .

So it sounds like this is all in the all-in-one fixtures, not the pendants. Thank goodness hahaha....

I've very interested in this lighting system for my 400 gallon under construction right now. I had planned 6 x 250W MH w/flourescents and a chiller....but if I could avoid all that it is pretty tempting.

I have the same problem as everyone else. I can't afford to be a test subject. I know that MH will work, but I have yet to see anyone's longer term results on only LED.

Advanced Aquarists product review for Solaris LED

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2006/8/review2

Very informative article. I did some calculations to compare a 4' long Solaris vs the other MH/PC actinic lighting units sold by J&L. After you take into account the hydro savings & bulb replacement savings, it was only a couple hundred more over a five year span to buy the LED Solaris than with the older systems (it was a lot cheaper than the Geisemann unit). Also, I only used the 175w MH versions in my comparison, so if it is comparable to 250w MH, then the price difference would be even less.

Still, I will wait for later models before I consider replacing all my MH with LED lights.

Anthony

I think I'll wait for the prices to come down before considering one.Even with savings considered,it's still a large hit on the wallet to purchase.Also unless Im missing something,they didn't give par/pur values for differant depths.So we still don't know how much of a punch they will have on a larger tank.

what a joke of a article. they measured the PAR of the led array at 50mm, thats 2" and then they cooked the results of the XM bulb.. I just lost a lot of respect for Dana.

I get PAR measurements in the 5 to 700 range at the bottom of my tank from a SA bulb and the XM tested about the same output as the SA so right there it tells you that the XM should have the same out put as the Solaris but at 12 X the distance. also they put plexy in front of the bulb, why?? did they use a DE bulb? if so they picked the lower output to compare from the get go and reduced the output even more. Also what ballast did they use?

I don't know to me it looks like a cooked article to push the sales of solarius instead of a real comparison. hell they should send me one and I will test it against several bulbs.. won't be able to do that fancy plotting to make it look better but I can do real life tests at 20" distances through both air, water and a combination.

Steve

question
 

Steve did you post a question to Dana regarding why PAR was measured at 50mm?

im sure that would be an unbiased artical.

nope this morning was the first time I saw the article and was almost lait for work.. hehe.. I maybe overstated my disapointment with Dana as I hadn't had my coffee yet but I am still disapointed with the testing and the article.

I don't even know where Dana does his forum now, if it is RC or reef.org then I don't go to either anymore.

Steve

are you being serious or sarcastic? anything I have posted has been unbiased. If I tested LEDs and they were close to MH output I would probably be one of the first to buy one or try make my own:mrgreen: as I have been fooling around with LED's on my tank for about 2 years now (well not so much for the last year as when I cleaned up I put my box (with 300 LED's and about 500 resisters, away some where and I can't seam to find them :redface: I am now wondering if they made it into a box that went under the house....

Steve

What ever happened to all the love HO T5 was getting? LOLOLOLOL?

Has anyone acually bought one of these yet because i am thinking of buying the 48" PFO Solaris-G 20K LED Lighting Fixture in about a month.