Orphek or AI

[intarsiabox]

Originally Posted by southerner2

Yea, your right not dimmable.......Guess I will just stick with my MH.....wait a minute....those aren't dimmable.....Guess i will throw those out too.......My PC on my nano aren't dimmable....in the trash they go.....

Really????

Why is dimming such a big deal....people use this one argument for this fixture or that fixture....Very VERY few fixtures have any sort of automatic ramping on their dimming features....

i'm more concerned about the look, coverage and results.....I refuse to 86 anything just because it doesn't have dimming....

We've done very well for all these years without dimming....I don't think at this point dimming is something that I am ready to base the health of my system on....

As for shock on the corals...the argument that ramping eases the daily cycle for our tanks make sense to me...I'm not totally ignorant on logic but man....at every step with LEDs all I hear about it dimming.......

Still waiting to see a truly grown under LED tank with big colonies.

Ever think there is other reasons for dimming? Dim the white bulbs for a more blue effect or increase the white and dim the blue for growth. You ask for peoples opinions on these two fixtures and then trash their comments, if you don't want a dimmable fixture then take the AI's off your list and don't bother people for their opinions anymore.

[TJSlayer]

As others have already said dimming is more about the ability to control color and output intensity.

Other wise the only way to contol intensity is to raise or lower the lights from the surface of the tank, and if your ok with that than it may not be a deal breaker for you.

But with all the other choices in lighting if your nt happy with the color you simply change the bulb, not quite that easy with LED, and at least with the dimming aspect you can increase or decrease the basic color spectrums.
more/Less Blue vs more/less white.

As far as the sunrise, moon phase settings, storms, clouds, etc; and having dozens of different light intensities throughout the day those are what I call fluff features. None are really "needed" but some are pretty cool.

But when it comes down to it the way I made my decision is to look at what my budget was, and I purchased the light with the most features, and wattage I could get for the money.

Ultimately it's your cash so get what is important to you, but I think the dimming option is a must unless you can change individual LED's easily otherwise you may get it and decide you hate the color etc.

That said there are many users of the orphek lights that are quite happy, and I believe they will customize it to a certain extent for you as well, but once it's done, I'm not sure how easily you could change things around if your not happy.

The AI option has everything so I would go that way over the Orphek, but then again for the same cash you could go with the prometheus by reeftech as well which is even better when I was digging into the specs and such.

Many choices out there just depends on your budget and needs...

TJ

[mr.wilson]

I have an AI Sol with a dimmer. It was fun to play with to establish what colour I wanted, but after 10 minutes I had no further use for it. I have a profilux controller but the lightning and cloud effects are not of any interest to me.

I also have some plasma lights from Straylight with dimmers. If I dim the light it becomes more blue, but at the cost of most of the PAR. I leave them at full power as most users will. They are horribly yellow but I'm using them for mangroves and Chaeto.

Dimming a light to acclimate new corals only stresses out your old corals. As someone else mentioned, raising the light will give you the same drop in intensity while spreading the coverage.

Dimming also alters the spectrum of the light so the advertised CRI, PAR and PUR numbers go out the window. Dimming alters the milliamps available to the LED chip from the driver. This means you may for example end up with proportionately higher amounts of yellow light in the 520-630nm range which will cause nuisance algae problems. This isn't necessarily what would happen, but you certainly won't get the same peaks and lows that are measured in the spectrograph of the light at full power. Drivers are sized specifically to LEDs to get peak performance. Even optical lenses are matched to peak performance to get the most out of the LEDs. Many LED lights are not bright enough in the first place so dimming is really a moot point. By the time you get the light high enough above the water's surface to get good coverage there really isn't much left to dim in many cases.

I use 450 nm blue light for dawn and dusk and turn the white lights on and off in sequence, right (rising in the East) and left (setting in the West) to follow the pattern of the sun. Obviously you can't do this if you are only using one fixture, but most people are using three or more.

Lighting is always a tough decision, I think tougher than protein skimmer selection and picking a wife. It's an expensive move and you're always nervous that something new will outmode what you buy. LED technology has plateaued, and broken away from its early pioneer days just a year ago. Some manufacturers are clearly better than others, but I don't think any of the brands you have mentioned here will disappoint you.

[lastlight]

To be honest I totally forgot about the ability to change the overall colour temp of the reef through dimming.

I suppose if you don't have dimming it's like buying say a phoenix 14k metal halide fixture and not being able to ever swap bulbs out.