Rapid LED suggestions

I am currently running a 29 gallon tank. I would ideally like to set up some LED lighting for it. Ideally having something that will eventually simulate sunrise and sunset.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should order from Rapidled? At the moment it is only a FOWLR tank but I am going to be adding corals and an anemony or two. I am a fairly technical person but I just don't know the application of each of the different color LEDs.

Thanks for any input. Also, I was wondering if somebody could suggest some sort of dimmable conroller I could use to simulate sunrise/sunset.

 

I had the same questions with the same tank. I just emailed rapid and mike emailed me back with all my answers. They are friendly and fast at responding.

I went ahead and ordered rapids standard kit and and apex controller for all the programming. It was an expensive setup but ill never have to change my lights again
I used three drivers to control blues on one, whites on another and colors on the third.

 

It sort of depends on what you want to keep. I have a little 29 plugged into my system, that just has two boost led spotlights at the moment (so, 10 under-driven 3W CREE LEDs). However, it is intended as a low-light tank. If I were to keep more demanding corals, I may prefer a heck of a lot more. For an "SPS dominant" tank, or tank with clams, I may even want around 3 times that.

For colors, avoid cool-white (CW), they are junk IMHO, the spectrum is mostly just blue, with a little other color, corals look like crap. Neutral white (NW) is much better, you could even do a few Warm White (WW), but go easy with them, they are easy to overdo. Royal blue is of course a favorite, but I also like a few regular blues to bring out the greens and teals.

I would say, my personal favorite color combination would be about 3:2:1 RB:B:NW
That's sort of a personal preference though, but after trying all sorts of combos, that just looks really awesome to me. A bit like a 14000K Phoenix MH, but with more "POP".
Red LEDs seem to be tough to mix in, so, I would tend to avoid them. Green isn't really necessary IMO, as Blue does much of the same and mixes better. I do have a EC Techno LED PAr38 with an amber led in the center, that gives a nice effect. If more red was desired, I think an amber or two might be a good alternative, but the NW and WW will have a lot of red, and also mix pretty easily, so, it may not really be necessary. the pre-caned, CW/RB kits are junk though IMO, CW/RB is too blue dominant and you loose a lot of color with such a cool color pallet.

 

Does the Stanard $500 APEX system come with the light module or would that be something I would have to add?

 

Also add some TV's in there, very important. Some "exotic" colors that help w/ the spectrum are greens, cyans, and deep reds.