Aqueon LED strips worth the trouble?

[MichelleRay]

Quite a while ago now, I picked up 3 30" and 1 48" Aqueon led light strips in glass tubes. I do not have the fixture that these are meant to go with. I was debating stopping by lowes to see if I can find some things to let me set them all up together over my tank as I would like to improve the lightning on it. However I can't quite be sure if they are going to be worth the trouble as I'm not sure how to translate their information to what I need.

The tank is a 55g rectangular, standard dimensions. I've got some stock lighting on there now which obviously sucks for anything but fish. I want to keep mainly zoas and some nps coral as well as macros and some plants/macros.

The 30" strips say they are 4 watt LED blues. There are 15 LEDs on each strip. I am not sure if that means it uses 4 watts total, or each light uses 4 watts. The longer fixture has 29 LEDs on it and says 7 watts.

I'm thinking it means that's the total wattage used in which case I will be getting rid of the strips and looking for a good fixture, but I wanted t check before I do either option. Thanks for any and all help!

 

[FugeTown]

I used an aqueon led strip back in 2014. My corals didn't grow super fast like under my T5's I have now but they did pretty good. I only had the one candy cane coral and some zoanthids so probably not a good reference if you plan on using one for many different corals. Here's a pic of what the candy cane coral looked like under the aqueon with white strips, they didn't have blue strips available when I used the light which I think that's a really cool option. I'll add two photos from the aqueon and a recent one under the T5's.

 

[mcarroll]

Quite a while ago now, I picked up 3 30" and 1 48" Aqueon led light strips in glass tubes. I do not have the fixture that these are meant to go with. I was debating stopping by lowes to see if I can find some things to let me set them all up together over my tank as I would like to improve the lightning on it. However I can't quite be sure if they are going to be worth the trouble as I'm not sure how to translate their information to what I need.

The tank is a 55g rectangular, standard dimensions. I've got some stock lighting on there now which obviously sucks for anything but fish. I want to keep mainly zoas and some nps coral as well as macros and some plants/macros.

The 30" strips say they are 4 watt LED blues. There are 15 LEDs on each strip. I am not sure if that means it uses 4 watts total, or each light uses 4 watts. The longer fixture has 29 LEDs on it and says 7 watts.

I'm thinking it means that's the total wattage used in which case I will be getting rid of the strips and looking for a good fixture, but I wanted t check before I do either option. Thanks for any and all help!

Can you post some pics or at least links to what you're talking about?

Sounds like a lost cause, but I'm probably not getting the mental image you're drawing.

 

[MichelleRay]

The Aqueon modular light is just a fixture that lets you add strips of LED. Each fixture holds up to 3 strips, and those can be either daylight white or blue actinic. I don't have the fixture, but I have the strips. Here's a video about it

These are the bulbs I have
https://www.amazon.com/Aqueon-Blue-...qid=1508650223&sr=1-6&keywords=aqueon+modular

However I am debating picking this one up instead as it seems pretty decent and the price isn't so bad. I just hate letting the bulbs I have go to waste.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AS4ANUK/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I2R4KYR9WZZRYI&colid=15M6RBJG0BGQV

 

[mcarroll]

It's cool if you can think of a way to use these (get one of these hoods, or sell em) but for a 55 I think I'd look elsewhere for light....it's sort of a deep tank for these.

I think 3 of the other lights you linked might work pretty well.

A 48" Current Orbit IC appears to be on sale for <$200 right now – a single one of those would do it. Same for the Orbit Pro.