Suppliment Halide's with LED's

[sphelps]

Who told you 24 LEDs is eqiuv to 400W halide? That would mean I have equiv of 2000W of halide over my tank which isn't even close.

For supplemental I would stick to all royal blue LEDs in combination with halides and I wouldn't use 60 degree optics, 90 max, but personally wouldn't use any.

[Lampshade]

24's LED's comparing to a 400W was a bad example, the AI has the same par, but nowhere near the spread using 16 XPG's and 8 blues.

The a reason i was thinking white was because the Halide already have a huge peak in the blue range, so the white LED's would spread out the light spectrum a bit more. After looking into it, the blues seem to have a very high par reading as well, i didn't expect that at all. I'll look into it a bit more.

As for optics I was wondering why not to use them? everywhere I've read shows that optics greatly increase the usable light, any reason not to?

[sphelps]

In terms of PAR you have to think about what it means, this shows the typical chlorophyll spectrum that plants use for photosynthesis, you'll notice it's all in the red and blue so a light that emits purely blue light will have high PAR. Same reason that the LED grow lights only have blue and red leds, whites aren't as efficient, they contain some but not as much.



But the main reason I suggested royals for supplemental is they IMO are the real advantage to LED, they have a nice actinic affect while maintaining good output and will be beneficial for color and growth when combined with other lights. White leds offer very little in those areas.

[kole]

Tagging along. I'm about to do a similar setup. I want to supplement a 250w halide over a 70 gallon corner tank.