led project?

Ive been tinkering around with the idea of led lighting for my 40 breeder reef. its gonna be mixed with sps and i was wondering if LED's would support sps corals and if so how many for a 40 breeder. i saw at steve's leds that he sells LEDs for under $3 each so i figured i would get them from him. but if you guys can help me decide if i should do that or not that would be great, THANKS

 

IMHO those won't be powerful enough. I would check out Rapid LED and get one of their DIY kits. I think the 12, or to be more secure, 24 kit would do you fine.

 

Agreed with ReefBruh. A little saying comes to mind and I have modded it to be 3reef friendly: poop in=poop out.

You start with inferior LED's and you will end with an inferior DIY project that will cost you double because you will then be so dissapointed that you will go out and buy what you should have in the first place. Only to have some other electronic paperweight and a lighter wallet.

 

thanks for the oppions (facts) lol but 24 leds would be enough?? i was thinking 36-48.

 

I think they would work just fine! sure their not cree, but they would work. Cree leds are getting considerably better light out put than a t5 and so if you used a slightly weaker led it would still work, but would not be quite as strong. I would get some real numbers to compare, nanometer or spectrograph, lumens per watt, and par numbers would be a good start to compare. I would then compare how much light you are losing to how much money you are saving. It makes since that there are going to be a lot of leds that are almost as good as cree for a lot cheaper and if your willing to let go of that last 5% power efficacy or what ever amount cree is better than you could save a bit of $ for a light that is 90% as good.

 

I mean your not going to get rid of your cree light with xr-e leds in them just because they have xp-g leds now. The xr-e will still work just fine even though it's not as good as the xp-g, but supratt I did not see to much info on the leds. I bet you can get more info and I'm thinking that the numbers are not going to be too bad, but you'll never know until you compare numbers.

 

thanks a bunch damon!!

 

so how many led's do you think i would need to keep sps happy?

 

24 should be plenty if placed "low" to the aquarium without optics. I had 13 on a 30 Gal (13" tall), and thought it to be a lot of light. I had no optics on it, 6" above the water. If you were to get say 36, with 60* or 80* optics, you would need to place the fixture higher off of the water to get full coverage.

EDIT: Get XP-G's...much better light.