[blasterman789]

Originally Posted by tahiriqbal

Blasterman789....... As usual you pop around every now and repeat what people have already discussed

Baloney. I'm the only one that's brought up a solution to the issue. Many of you are so busy copying what one or two guys have done over at Nano-Reef with small tanks and arguing about dimmer circuits it's annoying.

99% of DIY reef builds are RB + cool-white Crees, with no discussion towards other brands of LEDs or colors. I can hit the same PAR values and improve color with a build that costs no more than half what it costs with current Cree centric designs, and you don't see me making official write-ups.

There are no such rules set in stone regarding ratio or for any particular flux for the white LEDs.

Again, total Bull, and OP here has confirmed this. The rule is that you use 3watt Crees, only use RB and cool-white, spread them all over your tank like recessed lighting in your basement, and obsess over the best way to build a dimmer circuit. Would you like me to link 1,000+ or so threads to prove it?

A couple guys dictate these LED tutorials, and they're all the same. "Use cool-white and RB Crees because they're the standard". The result is crap color, and there is no open thought on this because those of you who've dropped several hundred dollars on cool-white based lights won't admit it. However, a year or two down the road I'm betting you'll quietly dump your lights and replace them with SMD based strips using better color combos, cheaper, and likely not running Cree.

Your argument has already been discussed on other thread and please don't try to repeat yourself over and over again.

It hasn't been discussed because the guys pushing Cree lights also sell them, which is a serious conflict of interest and a forum violation.

I don't care what emitters you use, but I encourage people to at least try different color ratios small scale before commiting. You have a problem with that? Also, please don't tell me what to post or how to think, got it? If we were discussing this in an engineering board room you'd likely be excused because I'm objectively open to other solutions.

This is a very difficult topic to discuss in an online forum because people like different colors in their tanks.

It shoudn't be difficult, and that's what's annoying. With metal halide you have a choice of a dozen brands of bulbs all of which deliver excellent color and PAR, nobody obsesses over dimmer circuits for halides, and nobody running 400watt halides is told they should use a dozen 30watt halides so they can get 'better coverage'. T5 users have an ever greater array of options.

However, with DIY LED threads you are only allowed the option of Cree, RB, and cool-white, and how dare you use something other than Cree or cool-whites? Doesn't this seem a bit odd? Why is it nobody pushes you to use cool-white CFLs over your tank, but cool-white Crees are 'the standard' when the spectrum is similiar?

This could be mitigated if the LED manufacturers came up with a simple way to plug and play different LEDs into their mounts/connectors allowing people to customize the color to their preference, much like T5s.

Originally the Chinese were just using cool-white and RB because for the most part Asians manufacturers are copycats. However, the trend has been increasing towards SMD based lights that look like T5's, and those tubes having color combos of preference. So, your color options will likely be like changing T5 tubes.

The current DIY design of spreading 3watt LEDs evenly around a big chunk of aluminum is already obsolete. Again, this works fine for a nano tank, but is inefficient and expensive on larger tanks. Don't take my word for it - just look at the direction recent commercial lights are going.

Another controversial topic is that PAR meters are typically not skewed properly for reef requirements and put too much weight on longer spectrums because they are primarily designed for terrestrial fruiting plants. The result is that cool-white LEDs yield a false high meter reading with PAR meters, even to the point where I've seen white only LEDs deliver higher meter readings than twice the wattage of RBs. This is absurd and why I don't trust PAR meters except for same spectrum reference tests. Far blue is the action spectrum for corals, and if you think the high levels of green and yellow-green light in a cool-white LED contribute to photosynthesis somebody needs to go back to science class.

What this means is your tank looks darker than your halides as I believe you complained about. The main reason for this is because cool-white LEDs are given more PAR weighting than they should. As long as you have sufficient RB, and this includes the blue that's in cool-whites to be fair, everything else is optional. The good thing is that LEDs are hyper efficient at producing 450-470nm light. Originally I was using 450lumen Bridgelux cool-whites without RB, and getting decent PAR. It was simply because there was enough far blue buried in those high powered emitters to keep things growing. Color sucked though, but at the time I was on the band wagon.

Again, the color problem is greatly helped by simply trying different color combos, such as warmer LEDs closely flanked with two or even three RBs. It will get you in the ballpark of 20k or 14k halides and actually drive actinic colors harder. This fixes color disco problems as well. Also, once you stop using cool-white LEDs Cree doesn't have such an efficiency lead and there's more LED options.