Question about leds for my 30g cube

nolen502 · May 12, 2014

Hey guys! I am new to LEDs, always been an old fasioned metal halide kinda guy. But, I recently acquired a 30g cube setup and it came with diy led fixture. It has 12 3w cree leds, 6 blues and 6 whites. Would this be enough to support sps? Since this is going to be a sps dominant tank.

ReefLEDLights · May 13, 2014

The Cree Cool White for the most part is full spectrum missing the Blue and Deep Red.

The Deep Red is mostly blocked after 10-20 feet so corals in nature adapted to not use it for primary photosynthesis.

Some argue that you need close to 100% CRI to grow corals or make them look better...This is simply not true.

I've grown frags using only 450nm Luxion and Cree Royal Blue with great results.

Depending on the bin of your Cool Whites I would add 12 Royal Blue driven at 700-100mA....

Maybe toss in a couple XP-E2 Blues to even out the spectrum...The XT-E Royal Blue offers more grow per watt.

On tanks your size, 25 Cree X series driven at 700-1000mA without optics works quite well.

Depending on the look you want you might want to add a tertiary colour or two like red or green to tweak the look to your taste.

Bill

nolen502 · May 14, 2014

Thanks for the reply! After researching for the past few days I think I've made the decision just to go with halide. This Led stuff just seems to technical lol.