Sunbrite F Series LED light fixture

[SunBriteLED]

Originally Posted by ieatchinese

Well, I have begun the build and have made significant progress since starting two days ago.



While I like all the colors that the light generates, I do have a couple of complaints.

I was a little concerned about the fact that the LED's in this fixture didn't come with some kind of lens/optic. I thought about this and based upon my experience with the AI Sol's, which made some hot-spots with the lenses, I thought that not having lenses would provide more of a dispersed light .......well, it sure does. The light splash with these fixtures is huge. The light that gets out of the tank and onto the ground and onto the surrounding walls is significant. A large reflector that surrounds the light, but would keep more of the overall light inside the aquarium would be something that I would buy in a heartbeat. This would make the light less attractive, but that isn't why I bought them anyway. I may try to fabricate some reflectors for this purpose, but I don't like when I see reflectors that are not professionally made (stamped and formed so that they both look good and are precisely optimized. Not sure that all of this is for naught. The light splash may change once I have water in the aquarium. I will be filling in the next day or so and will post the outcome at that time.

One other thing, and this one really bothers me, when power goes out on the lights, they do not begin the programmed timers ....they just come on full blast, every channel. This is not right. This is how a tank full of corals gets fried. If I am away on a business trip and the power goes out in my neighborhood and then comes back on, the lights come on full blast and stay that way. I have only done a couple of short tests to come to this conclusion, but I was wondering if anyone else has observed this. Again, this is a huge concern and needs to be fixed. I can connect again with my iPhone and reapply the timers, but as I said, the issue is when someone is gone from home for more than a few hours. These lights generate a lot of PAR and corals can very easily get torched if this scenario happens...and it will.

I have also asked the manufacturer if they would consider making the lights so that they simply connect to my local area network, just like any PC or just like my thermostat (NEST) does. This would allow remote, internet access to the lights and then I could control them when I am on the other side of the earth. My Apex would send me the message that I had a power outage and I could then make sure that the lights were operating as they should.

One last thing. I have two of these fixtures over my tank. They do not communicate in anyway with each other. When I am setting up timers, I have to do them separately and cannot copy timers from one to the other. This makes for a really laborious and time consuming setup to match one fixtures timers and settings to the other. A web-based interface to the fixtures and an update to the iPhone app that allows one to copy a complete set of timers from one to the other would be most beneficial. Maybe even a configuration page that allows one to designate one of the fixtures as the master and all others that the master can detect, as slaves. This would be a very good improvement with the lights.

The fans in the control boxes are also pretty loud. Not such a big deal for me as they will be mounted inside the wall, but we'll see if I can hear them after they are embedded. Probably should be proportional speed control so that they are not running full blast unless certain temperatures in the box are detected.

Other than all the above, the lights are nice lights. I love the spectrum that they have and the possibilities of spectrum combinations. The fit and finish is very good. Now just need to tell us if the firmware can be upgraded in the field (through the iPhone app?) and make the units more accessible and connected to one another.

Hi Roy, your tank is coming along beautifully
I decided to chime in and hopefully can help you clear up a few issues.
As far as the light coming on full blast(100%) When power goes out and come back on if your light is not on a timer then the lights will come on as 100%, if you are already on a timer then the light will be back on the timer that was set before the power outage.

Currently our systems are on wifi(peer-peer) I know that you have both lights on one tank. We wanted our systems to be control independently, of course we will continue to work and improve the controlability of our lights. However, lets say if we have a customer with a 65G LPS/Soft and a 120G SPS both tank running on F-Series, if one timer set for both then the 65G will run the same amount of light as the 120G which is too much for LPS/Soft. We will look into web-base interface

[bimmer88]

yeah I couldn't replicate the problem about the lights coming on full blast after power goes out... i unplugged it then plugged it back in and the brightness was just right where it was supposed to be...

[ieatchinese]

Jon, Thank you for your attention to this and the information. Regarding the lights acting independently, I agree. What I am saying is that there should be an option to group control the lights or not. This would provide the capability that you originally intended and also provide what others with multiple fixtures over the same tank would need.

I have the lights operating on the timer and again, I unplugged and re-plugged them into the wall socket. The lights jump out of the timer and go full blast.

RonMidTownStomp: The issue is that LED lights generate a lot of PAR and the previous lights I had (AI Sol-blues) could not be run at 100% output without burning corals. Most of the folks that have LED's don't run them at 100% output as they usually will kill the corals (the light is too strong). This may be because it is LED and the LED's have a narrower spectrum than the more conventional lighting options. There is a 5 star thread on the AI Sol's that talks about this extensively and provides real-world results of folks burning up corals. I too had a few burns before I lowered the output to a maximum of 60%.

[RonMidtownStomp]

Oh, I understand now. I thought the concern was dark -> 60% immediately, not dark -> 100%. I also understand that you don't want to drive the LEDs themselves that hard. It sounds like you may have a controller issue, though.

[ieatchinese]

Ok, I turned off one of the lights and set the other one to run on the timers. I verified that it was running on the timers and then unplugged the light, waited a few moments and re-plugged it in. It resumed the program just like it should. Don't know if there is some kind of interference going on between the two lights or not, but I have left one of the fixtures off for now. Will keep trying combinations to recreate the issue. For now, it looks like I may have to just go with one light.

Thanks goes to Jon (SunBriteLED) for his patience with this. I will update if I can replicate the issue.

[niteshado]

got my 60" sunbrite last week. Awesome once I was able to access the timers (thanks support). My question is on the dimming cycle. Does the time that the lamps ramp up the the setting should the % be 50 or 100? I am trying to use a 2 hour ramp up time the the midday 6 hours at max.

thanks Larry

[ieatchinese]

I did a little test to verify the operation of the % dimming.

It appears that if you have a 6 hour timer and you set it to 50% dimming, it will reach the light output that you have specified for that timer at 3 hours into the timer (50% or half way in the 6 hour period. Let me know if you find the same results.

Roy

[niteshado]

Yes I thought that was happening since I was using a 2 hour timer with 100% dimming. May be to short a timer and I should use a longer timer with less percent for the dimming. Thanks a lot. Love the adjustability of this light and the shimmer from my old T5.

Larry

[ieatchinese]

What you described should take two hours to get to the illumination levels that you have set for that timer (100% of the time to ramp from timer settings before the timer to the end of the 2 hour period). Hope that SunBrite posts to confirm this.

[Northern Sensei]

it's interesting to hear all this info, we just got the word that as of this Friday ALL units will be shipped to the Canadian customers.
So some of these test that you guys are talking about will help me out in the quick setup phase.

Keep the comments and info coming, i should have my 72" unit by wednesday of next week!

[badAZZlars]

Originally Posted by ieatchinese

Ok, I turned off one of the lights and set the other one to run on the timers. I verified that it was running on the timers and then unplugged the light, waited a few moments and re-plugged it in. It resumed the program just like it should. Don't know if there is some kind of interference going on between the two lights or not, but I have left one of the fixtures off for now. Will keep trying combinations to recreate the issue. For now, it looks like I may have to just go with one light.

Thanks goes to Jon (SunBriteLED) for his patience with this. I will update if I can replicate the issue.

How does the spread look with just a single fixture? I have a unit being delivered to me next week and am a bit concerned about covered in my 24" wide SPS tank.

Thanks

[ieatchinese]

badAZZlars: 24 inches should be just fine with one fixture. My tank is 30 inches (front to back) and one fixture leaves corners dark. Not very noticeable and for most, the slightly darker sides will not be noticed.

If you determine that you need another light, let me know....I am selling one of mine as one is good enough (even for my 48 x 30 x 25). I am going to offer for a good deal.

[BonsaiNut]

Waiting on a web-enabled controller for these. Otherwise looks great

For the 15-20% of US households that have an iPhone, you guys just got a nice lighting option For the rest of us, we'll have to wait...

[RonMidtownStomp]

Perhaps for those without an iPhone, an iPod touch or an older iPhone that's no longer on network would work? In other words, does it work over wifi only?

[bimmer88]

Originally Posted by RonMidtownStomp

Perhaps for those without an iPhone, an iPod touch or an older iPhone that's no longer on network would work? In other words, does it work over wifi only?

there are other controls on the unit but it's a lot easier to set with the iphone

[RonMidtownStomp]

What I'm saying is, you may be able to buy a control device for like $100 on Craigslist. An older iPod Touch with Wifi and smaller capacity. I don't know what they cost, but I know a friend who got one for $100.

[reefdude135]

I think Sunbrite now has an Android app to run these fixtures.... I just saw something about it on their website.

[bimmer88]

Originally Posted by ieatchinese

Ok, I turned off one of the lights and set the other one to run on the timers. I verified that it was running on the timers and then unplugged the light, waited a few moments and re-plugged it in. It resumed the program just like it should. Don't know if there is some kind of interference going on between the two lights or not, but I have left one of the fixtures off for now. Will keep trying combinations to recreate the issue. For now, it looks like I may have to just go with one light.

Thanks goes to Jon (SunBriteLED) for his patience with this. I will update if I can replicate the issue.

OK... the issue happened to me last night... i've had it unplugged for an hour or two before without having this issue... last night i had the lights unplugged for 3-4 hours... when i plugged it back in, it was at full blast... looks like the lights have to be unplugged for an extended period of time for it to happen... So i guess i'm ok as long as i don't have any extended periods of power outages... Another thing i noticed is that when the lights are supposed to be completely off, the leds still light up VERY VERY low... not sure if this will shorten the life of the bulbs....

[ieatchinese]

bimmer88:

Mine were not unplugged for long periods of time. There seems to be some interference between two of the lights on the WiFi when controlling them with the application. Hard to tell what the issue is. I too noticed the low light level when commanding the LED's to 0%. If you use the manual controls on the electronics box this happens also and if you click the Set button multiple times it sometimes will make the LED go out completely. There is obviously some level of voice on the DC control lines for the dimming circuit. This is a design issue and depending upon how they designed the electronics a software patch could possibly fix it. Unfortunately, it is more likely going to require a hardware change to make this go away. Not sure if Sunbrite did the design or not or just asked a Chinese company to make something to their specs. I hope that they respond to this posting with some level of technical explanation to these issues.

[windowlicker916]

Wow...power failure and 100%.....big over sight!

Have you asked the manufacture about this yet? I recall that I read a post somewhere here on RC talking about something similar and the manufacture responded and I believe there was a fix or the owner did something wrong.

[ieatchinese]

Originally Posted by windowlicker916

Wow...power failure and 100%.....big over sight!

Have you asked the manufacture about this yet? I recall that I read a post somewhere here on RC talking about something similar and the manufacture responded and I believe there was a fix or the owner did something wrong.

SunBriteLED has responded. If you read the posts here you will see that they responded and have been informed of the issues.

[SaltNutz]

Ordered a 60" today for my 150 gal in wall tank. Replacing two 400 watt and one 250 watt MH. I can't wait. I'm so excited I could spit.

[badAZZlars]

Originally Posted by SaltNutz

Ordered a 60" today for my 150 gal in wall tank. Replacing two 400 watt and one 250 watt MH. I can't wait. I'm so excited I could spit.

I'm loving my lights but I hope you aren't expecting the same output as your current setup. I replaced my 3x250w halide setup with the 60" fixture and the output at 100% would be close to the 250's but not quite. It won't come even close to a 400w setup.

[bimmer88]

Originally Posted by badAZZlars

I'm loving my lights but I hope you aren't expecting the same output as your current setup. I replaced my 3x250w halide setup with the 60" fixture and the output at 100% would be close to the 250's but not quite. It won't come even close to a 400w setup.

Maybe there's something wrong with your fixture. I replaced my 3x250 as well. When I set it at 100% it was WAYYY brighter than my mh's. I have to turn it down to 60-70% to match output of my halides

[niteshado]

Hi: All of a sudden the Wi-Fi for my Fseries LED light is not found by either my computer or I phone. Any body seen this before? It was there until about 4-5 days ago. I left a msg with the company. Need help ir you could.

Thanks Larry