southerner2

Can I ask what your association with Orphek is?

Where can us Canadian's source the Orphek lights?

- Brad

Ive been a member at 3reef for a while now, Orphek the company is a sponsor on our site and is the best of all LED companies out there. They come on our forums all the time and answer any ones questions. They also have the best emitters for our hobby as well as being one of the few companies that makes their own bulbs specifically for reef systems. More than AI's use of cree. They dont dim because they dont need to, they built them right.

Marine Depot carries their stuff, they ship up here.

Orphek.com their canadian distributers is reefwholsalers i believe

reef wholesale is not their distributor unless it changed a couple weeks ago.

the only place that sells them online in Canada is GoReef out of Quebec.

You're making some very big claims. I'm sure you have a good reason for your biased opinion. When you refer to "our site", which site are you referring to? Which forums are "our forums"? I'm sure Orphek makes a good light but I have to call BS on your statement about dimming. Any reefer's goal is to replicate all of the conditions on a natural reef, and one thing is for certain dimming is a natural occurrence as the sun rises or sets. No it may not be as essential to coral growth as the light spectrum and intensity but I am sure it's a benefit to the coral. Southerner2 went off the deep end when someone mentioned dimming but the bottom line is when all things are equal with PAR and coverage, it is the bells and whistles like control features, ability to upgrade, and form factor that will seal the deal. IMO of course.

Wonder if there were forums when halides started out in the hobby? Be interesting to see if that produced as much bickering and argument. I think people had gotten bored of arguing about skimmer technology and LED has filled a void LOL. Regardless of biases I'm impressed by the orphek's colour output (at least as captured in the photo)

Hey Brett, hommie (I can call you that right?). Do a search on HOT5's circa 2002-2003 and lol yourself dizzy :D

Haha yeah why did I forget about that? I was there to enjoy all that =)

I agree the colour does look awesome, and pictures never do justice so I'm sure in person they are amazing. I think the reason LED tech is so perplexing is because there is no apples to apples comparison of each of the LED's, a lot of the information out there is based on opinion and not fact. When I purchase my two Illumilux fixtures, I researched until I just about went cross eyed and in the end I was more confused than when I started. I really do think Vertex has nailed it with the Illumina and a person would be hard pressed to find a better fixture out there with more features (I am just a consumer by the way, not trying to promote one over the other) but they are insanely overpriced. Since LED tech seems to be following the same trend as any other electronics such as AV gear or computers, the LED fixture worth thousands today is paperweight tomorrow. I'm still a halide person, I do use LED for supplemental lighting and I have to say it looks better than halide and certainly better than the flat looking T5, and I would love to go all LED right now, I just think it's a little early and MH is still the economical choice.

I am a rookie reefer. Check my post and look at my tank. I am not running a very elaborate system and it is slow in coming. I am planning to upgrade to a 120g or so in the next year and wanted a system that I could "take with me" to the new tank. I went back and forth with the AI/Orphek thing for a long time (months). There are a lot of differences between the two and dimming is only one of them and that didn't matter to me because I knew I wouldn't play with it after the first day or two.

WHAT I BELIEVE- people spend a lot of money on their tanks, an inordinate amount of that money goes into the lighting systems. The last thing that most of us will do is to admit that the 1000's we dropped wasn't the best purchase possible. Most people will never admit that they didn't make the best choice. It's hard to spend that money and I only spent $850. Imagine people buying 3 or 4 lights and then realizing that oops...I should have bought..........take my coralife skimmer for example (ugghhh) it still hurts to think about it.

For me the all the hype around the LED thing boils down to success of tanks. It is true that most of the systems out there were grown out with MH and then switched to LED....It's just a fact for now because the tecnology is still new. So, I had to look, listen and evaluate for myself. The biggest thing that did it for me is when I saw tanks from my own marine society that had either AI or Orphek. Several of the guys in our club have AI and one guy and his wife went with Orphek. In talking with both "camps" The thing I found was they were both happy. I asked a lot of questions, algae growth, coral growth, feeding response to moonlighting, on and on and on....these people probably thought I would never leave their homes.....The couple even had my wife and I stay for dinner.....hahaha

In the end I went with Orphek beacause of a few factors:
1. Less DT algae under the Orphek
2. I like the color better. This is both about the color of the water and the coloration of the corals. I didn't like blue water. I liked the bright vibrant colored corals.
3. Coral growth- The couple with the Orphek saw better growth in their system and the amount of new growth visible on their colonies was impressive. The AI tanks had some growth as well... just not as much.
4. Apparent quality and long term reliability. This was obviously an opinion thing on my part I offered to disassemble their fixtures, they politely declined so I had to just look and touch and read.

I realize that the first 3 could be as much a result of the individual systems I saw the lights on as anything. However in my search I found a couple of tanks that gave me what I needed....a true side by side comparison. This tank really "did" it for me.....

Well said southerner2. You were very fortunate to have physical set ups to view before making your decision, most have only internet pictures and reviews to base their order on. We all know how seldom pictures recreate the actual colour spectrum of tank lighting. One thing for sure, it will be interesting to see how LED evolves over the next short while!