Led Lighting choices. Strip or par 38 pendants?

[fishoholic]

From what I've been told about led strips one strip is equal to one t5 bulb, so you'd need four 48" strips for your tank. I just ordered a par38 for my nano tank and am hopeful it'll work well for me. Not sure how much area it would cover over a larger tank, but I can see when I get it ie: test it over my 80g if you'd like.

[mike31154]

Aside from strip lighting & par38, there are also multi-chip LEDs that work very well for our application. They range from 10 watts each to well over 100 watts and are now available with multi colours on the same chip. Kessil uses a custom multi-chip in their light if not mistaken. I'm running a diy 10 watt multi-chip fixture over my 77 gal Hagen tank. It consists of 3 rows of 9 multi-chip LEDs per row with a mix of cool white, 10000K white, blue & royal blue. So theoretically I replaced 500 watts of MH + 130 watts of T5HO with 270 watts of LED. But I don't run the LEDs at 100%, so I'm not even consuming the full 270 watts. For me, switching to LEDs was one of the best moves I've made with respect to efficiency in keeping the tank running. Link to my build thread is below.

[miuYH]

I am using 2 Par30 bulbs and I am very impressed.

The colors, I find, are perfect for what I am after and all my corals are enjoying it.