BIg Whisky
Community Member
Look into SB Reef lights.
Need LED suggestions :)
- Thread starter Iiismet
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Umm yea lots of stuff actualy yes.
But I think one thing fills over look is pretty simple. That one light is made for many many applications. So IMO adjust it to your needs and wants.
And no. Look at many more par charts. And talk to the old schoolers and look at apogee. I know you don't belive in lux bit apogee does. A 150 mh put out a lot more light and a lot more par. As the increase is somewhat linear.
The ap at full is 35000 lux at 12. My ai is about 120,000. No matter how you do the math. That's more par. I do wish you could come over and we could test it. I have six different types of reef lights at my house righ now.
I'm not home but ksc posted a Radion link that's brilliant. I belive it was 1200 par at 12 in. Maxspaext website yea be skeptical. Puts out 7 to 900.
Totally right? They are doing something correct there. IMO you do have to keep algae out of the tank though. Red orange and yellow do grow green alge. Just sayin
Aside from that I love mine. A Radion mh grows it too just a little slower.
Lux can be manipulated all day long with mixes of different diodes so it's useless by itself. I have already shown that a sicce am466 pushes out 600 par at only 19k lux. A nanobox puck with lime has low lux with high par. To say that the ap700 has low output just based on random lux reading is silly. Also a reflector based led behaves completely different than an optic based one.
I do believe is LUX if it is properly covered to PAR, that's impossible when measuring diodes of different color/spectrum.
Also this: "If you have a lux meter, it is possible to convert lux measurements to PAR values. Use these results with some caution - in most cases it would be safe to assume the results will be low."
Advancedaquarist.com article.
BIg Whisky
Community Member
It's not random. It's long observation.
You welcome to come over with an apogee and test my six lights.
And that about a constant of 30 so maybe not too far off either.
Look at other readings and the one your getting and compare it to a mh at the same distance. I am talking about all lights too.
If he's at 70% call that 20000 lux and do the math. It's prob about the 200 par he's claiming. Again. It's pretty close.
But a light that puts out four or five times as much intensity Is going to put out more par any light. Plain and simple. It's like saying a 400w mh puts out the same as a 150. That in the end is why lux is actually somewhat linear. The math is all there. Look at the par charts of lights at 12 in. And that's because there made for different applications. It's not a Lux thing it's par thing. A light choice should be based on how much par you can get. Cuz really that's all ya have to go by.
Unless you use Lux and understand it's only somewaht linear..
Yes. And I've said that to. I do reccomend guaging a range. As if even if your 50 off that not a huge deal. Esp if that's when you stated with and balanced you nutrients to in the first place. If you start slowly increasing the amount Of light you will notice your nutrients drop If the rest of the numbers are in balance and the corals are growing.
I have exactly that now, I've started reading and dosing Potassium Nitrate. Seems to be helping. I had to remove my fish so there is little going in and I have powerful/multiple export systems for a high bio load.
Oh fwiw one of the points I'm tryin to make and am deeply investigating is. Figuring a Lux to par conversion number will tell you how good a light is spectraly.
How's that.
So the consistent constant number of 60 on a mars and a few others I've been able to find and my maxspect should tell you something.
How's that.
So the consistent constant number of 60 on a mars and a few others I've been able to find and my maxspect should tell you something.
Yes I've noticed. And diesel keeps close to the same numbers you do. If you haven't noticed.
As that tank ages it's going to eat more and more I think. My 30 is and is young Ish.
And my 55 is crazy like that. I let the wife feed the new rescue black sun corals like there was no tomorrow for a few weeks and the sand cyano Poped BIG time. Three weeks later it's gone.
I've already noticed a difference. This could very well be on of the biggest breakthroughs in Reef keeping for the last several years. As filtration and export tech has gotten so good our systems are literally too clean. I am so thankful I discovered it in time as I could have easily starved my tank no matter how much food I add.
No it doesn't. All it says if you have a high conversion factor is that the light pushes more green spectrum than another. Lux is how the human eye sees light. Nothing more and nothing less. That has no bearing whatsoever on what the coral takes in.
I can take an led with stacked 450nm royal blues and a single lime led to make it look whiter and it will have sky high par and no lux.
mcarroll
10K Club member
You would be surprised, I think. The bearing is not intentional – as you implied, lux was created with the intention of measuring what the human eye would see. But it's not so cut and dried as you make it out. It's not like someone is using a hammer to read light.
But A) nobody would do that because it would look terrible, and B) a PAR meter wouldn't read that light properly either.
We're not trying to account for every exception and every combination and we're not trying to kill the theory of PAR or anything like that.
We're trying to compare a very narrow niche of lighting. Reef lighting. Mostly 20,000K-ish reef-lighting. Mostly 20,000K-ish reef-lighting made from very similar arrays of LED's.
And we're trying to do it better than guessing with our eyeballs. (And it works.)
A par meter with a flat spectral response would read that correctly all day long. Par is the flat measured spectral response between 400-700nm. Not a bell curve with a 550nm bias like a lux meter. The new apogee just like the licor is pretty flat throughout except for 400-410nm.You would be surprised, I think. The bearing is not intentional – as you implied, lux was created with the intention of measuring what the human eye would see. But it's not so cut and dried as you make it out. It's not like someone is using a hammer to read light.
But A) nobody would do that because it would look terrible, and B) a PAR meter wouldn't read that light properly either.
We're not trying to account for every exception and every combination and we're not trying to kill the theory of PAR or anything like that.
We're trying to compare a very narrow niche of lighting. Reef lighting. Mostly 20,000K-ish reef-lighting. Mostly 20,000K-ish reef-lighting made from very similar arrays of LED's.
And we're trying to do it better than guessing with our eyeballs. (And it works.)
Last I checked the sicce am466 is a light designed for a reef tank. The conversion factor is nowhere close to 60 like you say it is for most LEDs. Kessil also has a much lower conversion factor.
Dave from nanobox has a prototype puck with mint and pretty much almost no white LEDs. It looks anything but crappy.
mcarroll
10K Club member
Pretty flat (which it is) is not identical to flat (which is required for "all day long" correct).
Definitely improved, but not perfect even by Apogee's own marketing. (They are an honest bunch!! I love them...I just can't afford them.)
We know this about lux....it's the luminosity function, which is not as simple as you make it out.
It's a dual bell, and one of them (which I think corresponds with our night vision) includes significant blue ≥450nm.
Overlaid (so X and Y axes match) for everyone's convenience:
If you look at Apogee's website, they offer conversion factors for their MQ-200 (the black line in the chart).....the MQ-200 is model that everyone with a PAR meter actually uses.
Same type of conversion as you'd use for a lux meter, only the conversion numbers are smaller.
You can see the vacant space under the dotted "square-curve" and above the other curves. This is what the conversion factors are "fixing".
The reason they offer these is that their MQ-200 is inaccurate without them.
The lux meter is also accurate without them.
The problem is not the lux meters are less good (which we can work around), it's that PAR meters are so expensive (which in most cases we cannot work around).
And the light you mentioned is vaporware so I don't even see the point in bringing it up except as an exception that proves the point that lux works in most cases.
(Can you link us to the supporting numbers for both by any chance? Esp. the Sicce.)
I think we're saying that around 50-70 is a safe (and pretty narrow) range that describes nearly all reef lighting. 60 is just a mid-point....and as such probably does describe a lot of fixtures.
Exceptions to the range, as far as I have seen, are bizarro lights that are either inappropriate (like high pressure sodium lights) or one-offs that "almost nobody" uses. I'm comfortable with exceptions since they are rarely surprising.
Also, we're saying it's not that hard to pin down a conversion factor that is very close to correct for a given reef light. If you know that those lights which you mentioned are different, then chances are you know (or can find out) whether they are higher or lower and can pick a better conversion factor.
Obviously having a lux meter and PAR meter both on hand to create an actual conversion factor would be ideal.
And you wrongly asserted what I do: I almost always use the conversion factor for plain sunlight, which is about 50. It's at least a known quantity to compare against, and it still works for me since I can estimate pretty intelligently.
(It's not that hard; mostly practice.)Mint
They've run out of names for LED colors?I only see "Lime" LED's on their website.
I don't even see "mint led" on a google search, so I guess we're co-marketing for someone here.... I'll bite.What's a "Mint" LED? (spectrum graph and technology if possible; i.e. single-frequency or phosphor-based?) How is it compared to a "Lime" compared to a "Green"?
"Almost no white" as you say, is the key....and as I already said (maybe it was another thread?).
It takes almost no whites for your full vision to kick in.
