A sneak peak, LED lighting experiment

[oceaniccorals-Ron-]

Originally Posted by pangp

this is a great topic.. i have always wondered how significant the performance difference was..

where did you guys purchase the chinese led's for $1.75? i would like to use those for a led refugium light..

Sorry, got the price wrong. They were actually $1.90 for the blues and $2.00 each for the whites from Satistronics.

But you get what you pay for. In my quick desktop tests the Cree XR-E had more than 2.5 time the output. Under my test conditions a single Cree XR-E cool white put out 130 PAR and a single cheap white LED put out 47 PAR. Big difference. In another test with the SemiLed emitters the Cree put out about 1.7 times more PAR then these particular ones. However, there are higher bin SemiLeds that I am hoping to get hold of that should be much closer in output to the Cree XR-E.