Quote:
Originally Posted by StirCrazy
I am starting to shy away from building an LED set up now, the more I read about LEDs the less I want them, so this plasma bulb is very interesting to me. this bulb is rated to retain over 80% of its output after 20000hours, which means if you run it for 8 hours a day every 6.8 years you need to change the bulb.
form what I have been reading about new High power LEDs is that they lose 60% of there output after aprox 2 years, and don't last 50K hours as the high power ones have a much shorter life span. I would say with a 60% average output loss in a couple years, you would be replacing LEDs every 2 years.. also the penatration is actualy quite pour compard to other point source lighting.
having said all this I am still concidering building a LED set up, but beforI do I have to do a lot more research and concider some pretty undesiriable trates.
Steve
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High Power LEDs will last the 50,000 hours as long as you keep them cool enough. I think failures were due to poor thermal management. LEDs do not like excessive heat. The Solaris units had pitiful excuses for heat sinks so that was likely responsible for most of those failures. I am going a bit with overkill on mine. But as long as you have adequate heat sinks and run a fan or two to move air over the heatsink the LEDs will last the 50K hours.
Penetration is poor because the output is something like 120 or more degrees wide so it is quite spread out. Adding even 80 degree optics will bump up performance quite a bit. 60 degree optics should give performance equal to or better than 150 Watt MH. 40 degree optics will equal or exceed 250 watt MH and 20 degree optics should reach 400 watt MH PAR levels. For any tank deeper than say 10 inches you need some optics to get better penetration and PAR at depth.