Planted aquarium LED lighting?

[Xak]

Anyone know anything about using LED lights for a planted aquarium tank? I see plenty of T5 bulb and Metal halide, but I've recently seen LED's available, but they are SUPER expensive compared to the others.

[NigelBond]

I'd be very interested in other peoples experiences on the subject. There are comercial led light hoods for marine tanks but they are very expensive and not likely going to do much for fresh water planted tanks. I remeber seeing a thread on a forum several years ago where a guy made red and blue led arrays for a planted tank as an experiment and it worked but red and blue aren't going to look very nice. I think I could build something at a reasonable cost using crees from dx but who knows if it would emit the right spectrum for photosynthesis.

[zed]

Take a look at this:

http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.u...ead.php?t=9765

I'd be interested in building something to replace my tube lights.

[Oznog]

Well we had a thread on LED growlights: http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/...d.php?t=204092

Only blue and long-wave "deep red" are really effective wavelengths for photosynthesis. Most reds are too short to cover the narrow photosynthetic response peak.

This would grow the aquarium plants on much less power, but may not be visually appealing. Perhaps change to white to watch it? Or add some blue/deep red around the white array?

[nein166]

Well I'm building my own and will document the differences in growth of my plants. Currrently the tank is lit by a PAR38 CFL-23w at 3000K it is getting 2 RGB sets and 3 XR-E Q5
I started a thread on it in Fixed Lighting

[Oznog]

Well, like the PAR chart shows the problem is the chloro-a long-side peak is 670 nm. No RGB has a red that long. LEDEngin makes a big powerful red in that range though. These other "UFO" growlights are using masses of deep red small-package LEDs. Unfortunately I don't see a ready supplier of those thing.