PFO LED lighting

[midgetwaiter]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

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.

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.

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by midgetwaiter

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

[midgetwaiter]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

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.

[G1GY]

Originally Posted by midgetwaiter

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.

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.

.

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.

[jess]

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.

[TheReefGeek]

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?

[jess]

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.