LED Color Combos
 

Just looking for some input from people using colors other than whites and blues in their LED set-ups. I recently purchased a DIY kit. Before I get too involved in building it am wondering if I should be using some greens and reds along with the whites and royal blues.

I actually powered through an entire thread about this subject yesterday on nanoreef called LED Aesthetics. Its mostly for non-dimmable setups where you can't adjust the colors so getting the right balance of led colors are more important. Basically the other colors (Cyan, Red, True Violet) can make certain corals pop, but have to be run at lower power on a dimmer so they dont overwhelm the rest of the tanks color. Also if these colors aren't spaced correctly it can produce a disco ball effect in the tank or leave colored shadows.

Neutral White however appears to blend well with royal blue (3RB:1NW ratio) and leave a warmer color in the tank that isn't overpowered by the royal blue. There are lots of comments that the cool white are too blue for many people although its seems there are many tanks running fine with cool white royal blue combos. It can also depend on the bin number of your leds as two different bin numbers can produce very different colors or temperatures of white so they recommend test building your setup on small scale to determine if you like the color first and then make changes from there. That was just my take on it but there is lots of experimenting with colors and interesting ideas to read on.

Cree Cool Whites are anything BUT too White. They are more warm/yellow. Even the owner of RapidLed agrees....

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh....php?t=2089818

the debate on this is not how they look, but rather the missing wave lenths that are in the nutral white that catch some of the colors of the corals that the cool whites miss.

if I were building a system right now it would be 1 nutral white, to 1 or 2 royal blue and 1 true violet.

Steve

Cool whites are rated at 5000 to 8300, neutral whites are 3700 to 5000. Where are you going to get the 5000 to 8300 wave lengths? I'm curious why you wouldn't use neutral whites and cool whites to catch even more wave lengths?

Yeah, i'm debating breaking out the soldering gun again and possibly mixing in a couple neutral whites just to catch some more wave length. Also considering supplementing in a t5 fiji purple for the reds.

When I recently built my LED fixture, I read through that nano reef thread mentioned above. They recommended having all four main colours, rb, nw, cw and normal blues. If going with one colour of white, they recommend nw's over cw's, with the nw's and rb's in a 1:2 ratio. Not sure how important it is to have nw's over the cw's but supposedly you get a wider spectrum that way.

The normal blues are more of a baby blue colour (whereas rb's are slightly purple) and I've noticed some corals pop more with the blues on as well. You only need a few of them, as they are very overpowering and easily give the whole tank a baby blue colour (unless you like that colour).

The misc. colours (cyan, red, violet, etc) seemed too difficult to add in effectively as the drawbacks seem to outweigh the benefits. Adding those in might be overkill IMO.

2:1 royal blue to neutral white is the way to go and you can supplement with True Violet to get some good growth.

Steve. My comment was a reply to jfish stating that many ppl find the cool white LEDs too blue.....

Does this look too blue?
http://i908.photobucket.com/albums/a.../PremVSReg.png

These are two different bins of coolwhite XP-G ...but them both seem warm white to me. Cool white should be straight white.

Here is the RC link... http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh....php?t=2072326

ok, your confusing final kelvin equivalent with spectrum. I am talking spectrum. so lets look at a royal blue vs a blue. they both have a peak of about 430nm and they both have small spikes in the 430 to 520 rang also. the blue has more in the secondary range than the royal blue does so the resultant kelvin equivalent is higher.

also they don't have a range of 3700 to 5000 what they mean is some bins will have a 3700 rating, some bins will have a 4000 rating and some bins will have a 5000 rating.. other bins are different. so the bin of led is also very important.

same with the whites, a nutral white will still have wavelengths in the whole range but the amounts will be different than in the cool white. Kelvin is just the perceved color output to our eye which is a combanation of all the different wavelenghts the source emits.

go to page 5 of this PDF to see the spectral chart for the three white leds and you can see what I mean
http://www.cree.com/products/pdf/xlamp7090xr-e.pdf

Steve

I like the one on the left.. looks just like the reefs in hawaii when your snorkeling I think when they say to blue they are talking about when combined with RB LEDs. for instance the one on the right would temper the royal blue much more than the one on the left.

Steve

Thank you for the information and link to the chart. I do think the chart's show that a combination of both is still best to get a good mixture of wavelengths.

I wouldn't say that realy, I think it shows that the nutral white is a good ballance of the other two, and combines good with RB. I also feel the adition of True viliot would be a good thing as it provides for a lot of the missing spectrum in the chlorophyll A spectrum peak.

the wave lenth for photosynthisis is 380nm to 750nm (lot of misconception that anything under 400 is UV but UV doesnt start till under 380) the absorption of light by chlorophyll "A" is at a maximum at 430, and the max rate of photosynthisis is about 460, but its actualy a broad curve between 380 and 500. there is also evidence to show that chlorophyll can use light we cannot see in the 320 to 380 range but it is at a lower rate of adsorption so it wouldn't be nessasary at this point.

ok realy got side tracked here LOL anyways what I am looking at for my setup is 1 nutral white, to 1 royal blue to 1 true violet. I am thinking about adding blue to the mix also, but I am ordering two of each to play with and set my exact combo. I want to set a final color that is close to what I like when all LEDs are at 100% this way i can get and exact color with minimal reductions in any one color compared to the others.

Steve

The problem you will have with neutral white and even the yellower cool white bins is spot lighting effect (especially with optics)....it's just too hard to blend a yellow light. What they need is a true white with a broader spectrum. Have you built any LED fixtures yet Steve?

No one is using 3000k or 6500k T5s and trying to blend them with blue......

IMO the Cree whites have a ways to go in development for aquarium use. I really like the direction Orphek is going. LEDs designed for aquarium use.....not LED designed for home and industrial use and adopted by the aquarium industry.

I decided to do a blend of Royal Blue, Cool White, Neutral white and some limited straight blue. Haven't lit it up yet...but we'll see what it looks like sometime soon.

The orphek PR-156 looks great. From their website, it looks like you only need 1 for a 48 inch long tank. Can anyone confirm this?

I saw this light at MACNA and I would say that's a no. I think you need at least 2. They quoted me as needing 5 to cover my 7' by 32" wide tank.

just some small ones playing around. I have minimixed the spotting by clustering, but waiting for a few more LEDs to come in to try it on a little bigger area. I am still playing with the older x-re for my white and royal blues so that might be why I am not having as much problem as you seem to be having as the newer whites are a lot brighter and will be harder to blend IMO.

Steve

what LEDs are they actualy using? I looked on there site and the info is pretty limited, but it looks like they are building a conventional style fixture from the pictures.

I have been playing with a couple edison and higher watt leds also and have come up with a few different ideas.. just got to find time to do some more playing befor I decide. my next exparament is (call me crazy if you want) I am going to try directly solder chips in close proximity to a curved heatsink/pcb combo, justy playing with trying to get the traces small enough and close enough togeather with what I have available. my idea is to get the LEDs close enough togeather and by there position on the curve I should be able to light and entire tank with one unit.

Steve

It is there own proprietary LED, that is designed strictly for the purpose of aquarium use.

Nope
They use someones chip and adjust it to their liking. There only only a handful of companies that make LEDs.

What these companies do is take a cree chip or a bridgelux or a epistar and package it in a way to sell it. So from the orphek site they have taken someones chip and developed the phosphorus layer with the locus they want and have started marketing them as LED fixtures. Most of these guys do not use the CREE chip, usually its a cheaper epistar or bridgelux to keep the costs down.

UMMMM.....Nope...sorry Milad you are wrong.

Here is a statement from their USA/CANADA REP....

"We are the only LED light manufacturer that engineered our own diode. Made specifically for coral reef aquarium lighting, we believe (and have the spectrographic data to prove) that our diode is superior to any other on the market for reef aquarium lighting, and doens't emit 50% of it's output in useless PUR as do Cree diodes!"

Also....

"The components of our lights, from the housing to the diodes themselves, are made by us, for us. There are no cheaply made or mass produced components in any of our products."

http://www.3reef.com/forums/orphek-l...us-101843.html

Also something to note is that most fixtures are simply using off the shelf LEDs(meaning the same LEDs we have access too and that are NOT changed or designed for aquarium use in any way) ...including the new Radion , vertex and AI stuff which all use off the shelf Cree LED.

Not all diodes on the Ecotech Radion are Cree. They use an Osram for the reds.

ok....but that still doesn't change the point of my post.

Lol much of the kool aid did you drink.
Let's assume for a second the rep knows what he is talking about. If that's the case then this small company is creating "efficient" LEDs that are as efficient as bridgelux LEDs. Bridgelux has probably spent millions apon millions to make their led chips to the efficiency they are. So you are telling me a eBay store (yes these guys were a china drop ship eBay store last year) can compete with the millions bridgelux spends on R&D? Ok

Worse case they make their own chips.

Best case scenario they use someone else's chips and they build their own phosphorus layer and locus which still takes alot of money. The rep could be considering this as their "own diode". If they are doing this. That's great.

None of this really makes a huge effect compared to using other LEDs. The AI sol will grow your SPS just as well.

I deal will sales rep daily and they try to give me kool aid but I say no.

Large companies/corporations do not always have the market cornered with respect to innovation & engineering expertise. It appears to me that Orphek has done at least several years of research into their product & from some of the reviews of actual users, the product is very good. After reading the information in the link to 3reef, I'm inclined to believe that a fair bit of effort & useful research has gone into their fixtures. The fact that they do not use Crees or even Bridgelux (which many have scoffed at until recently) may turn some people off, but there is more & more data appearing that shows there are other manufacturers out there producing diodes more than suited to our application. Bottom line appears to be that at the very least they've done extensive research into the colour spectrum required by our livestock & tailored their fixtures to that end.

It's irrelevant where their storefront may have been a year ago. To the best of my knowledge their head office is currently in Brazil, one of the strongest emerging market economies. We need to be careful of our foreign country bashing, particularly China. They have some very intelligent folks over there, just like any country in the world, many of them educated in some of our finest universities. I figure in a decade or two, our complacency & sense of entitlement with our still comfortable standard of living is in for a wake up call from emerging market countries like Brazil, China etc.

RE:MILAD

How do I know that it's not you serving up the kool-aid? I guess I'm supposed to believe that you know more about the product than the national rep?

You know companies can get sued for false product claims right. So this guy is a liar and a liability to the company i guess.

I show you a statement from the company...and you give me guesses and opinions....yet I'm to believe the guy who is just guessing he knows the situation.

Couldn't agree more.

Not worth my time to explain it to you. Hopefully someone else has the time to explain.

You probably also think Dell makes that LCD screen that are infront of you right now.

Some reading material for you

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...1856362&page=2
Those quotes took about 30sec of Googleing, try it sometime.

I can taste the purple drink your trying to give me but I don't want any.

I post a statement direct from the national rep and you give me hearsay (second hand relayed) information that comes from a guy in customer assistance.

Even IF they are using a big LED manufacturer to build their custom emitters I will take you back to my original statement that you disagreed with....

ANYWAY YOU SLICE IT .....THIS IS A TRUE STATEMENT.

Can you say the same for any other LED fixture on the market...I don't think so and surely not Ecotec, AI, and vertex.

Holy LED POLICE.....if I didnt know better I would think you have a vested interest in this conversation for some reason. :)

I don't have a LED set up at the moment, still playing the waiting game. However, it does seem apparent that more aquarium LED fixture manufacturers as well as newer DIY LED builds are looking into additional colours besides the whites & blues you mention. Not sure you're going to find that much info on any long term benefits either way at this point since the LED movement is still very much in it's infancy. But if companies like EcoTech, Orphek and some of the others discussed in this thread are any indication, there's certainly some benefit to additional colours. You'll likely need to wade through a lot of search results on various forums & search engines to get a better idea of what's going on. I suppose in this respect you're a bit ahead of the game with the DIY fixture, since you'll be able to customize it any time without too much trouble by simply replacing or adding LEDs as the need arises. With the Radion fixture or many of the other manufactured ones, you're more or less stuck with what they provide, unless you want to void your warranty and start dismantling them to customize your colour options.

Whats with you an national rep. Im the national rep for stark industries, does that make everything I say true? I deal with these guys on a daily basis and we are talking huge company reps. You have to be careful of their kool aid

I'm not knocking their product. I just don't want you to think "they make thier own led". They might package the actual led in a way that suits reef and the rep probably sells that off as making their own led.

I wasnt even bashing china companies. Some of them are good, most are sketchy at best. They will get better as we go along. Most of them just want your money. What I was pointing out in my previous statement about them drop shipping from china was the fact they probably don't have a large infustructer to actually make that LED.

You are going to see more and more the actual LED isn't going to be what makes or breaks the product. Instead you will see the trend being packaging the LED to be right for the application. By packinging I'm talking about matched optics to LEDs with matched spectrum and locus for the application.

That will be the future and these guys are on the right track but I highly doubt they make their own LEDs and it puts a bad taste In my mouth that their "national rep" or "god" in your beliefs is selling it off like that.

The contradictions are endless Milad. I will point out a few....

Then...
Seems like you said I was wrong and then told me that they have customized an LED for their proprietary use? NO?....which really agrees with what I said originally......head is starting to spin.

Can you inform me of other companies doing this?.....Every fixture that I know of uses off the shelf standard LEDs.

I have already put on the table the option that the national sales rep is lying....but surely not the website as well which states "Our lights are made of the highest quality electronics and optics, using diodes that we designed specifically for reef, corals or planted aquarium lighting solutions". In which case your above statements are still in agreement with mine.

Total speculation on your part.

Seems to me you have tons of time to engage in this discussion.

Now here is a big contridicion. You make fun of me for believing a statement made by the national sales rep yet to back up your argument for not believing him you direct me to a hearsay post provided by some user on a forum that wrote an answer from a customer service agent. Head is really spinning now.

I don't know...are you saying you misrepresent your companies product on purpose to make sales. Sounds like a pretty slimy thing to do.

And then .....wait for it...wait for it....
hahaha.

Ok tp recap...so in the end my statement should remain true about them offering their own proprietary LED, that is designed strictly for the purpose of aquarium use. Also I already put on the table the fact that the national rep lied or misrepresented the product. BUT WE DONT KNOW....and why should I believe you over someone who actually should know something about the product.

I just realized what reefmadnesses problem is. He doesn't know what makes up a LED. If you think my statements contradict then you don't realize what an LED is. I'm sure you are going to go off and Wikipedia led and start copy and pasting but rest assure I won't be coming back to this forum to read this thread.

It also makes me realize that most people mis understand the actual led component so the reps statement make you think it's this magical LED which it's not.

Hijacking the Hijackers
 

Way to hijack a good thread you two, can we get back to some discussion on LED Color Combo's now that your finished arguing semantics?

I've been looking at the Maxspect Mazarra and its a very intriguing light that allows you to replace LED Chipsets as well as lenses in a plug and play kind of way. The Reef versions comes with :

Cree XML 5w 8500K White
Cree XPG 3w 8500K White
Philips Luxeon Rebel 3w 480nm Blue

Philips Luxeon Rebel 3w 460nm Royal Blue

SIBDI U60 3w 410nm Super Actinic

SIBDI U70 3w 420nm Super Actinic

Pretty impressive line-up of LED's that are controllable through 4 different Channels.

I have one of the SWC Cree Fixtures (pretty much the same as any of the cheap chinese ones) that rocks straight 1:1 ratio of White to Royal Blue. The Color when mixed is okay but i dont know if i like the look of the tank with Royal Blue only. I was looking at a tank that had a few of these chinese fixtures alongside some ATI Blue t5 lamps and the color with both the T5's and the Royal Blue LED's was much nicer.

Problem is I have never seen the light from the straight blue LED's in person, can anyone here give some insight into the color difference between the two different kinds of Blue LED?

I go to work for a day and look what happens :mrgreen:

I say your both right. although I don't believe the specificly designed for aquarium use. what I do believe is that they did what I am looking at doing with my prototype if it works out for me. One of my best buddies lives in china and is incharge of a huge company which started out making parts and componants for there hot tub company here in canada. (artic spas) anyways they have also added led lights over the last 3 years.. they do not use Cree, bridglux, epson, but rather make there own to customers specs. when I was talking to him about trying to get some LEDs on the cheep he asked what Kelvin rating I wanted the output to be and what kind of intensity, as well as a few other questions. well I thought I could just get a few handfulls of Cree's off him so this took me by surprise. so last january when we got togeather for a funeral we talked some more, they do manufacture all there own LEDs and they are used by a lot of the companies in the household lighting area.

anyways the lense on thoes LEDs is what peeked my interest.. it looks like they are using a higher powered LED and actualy dispersing it a bit, which helps to prevent the rainbow effect on a larger fixture.. I am leaning towards the opposit right now trying to see if I can simulate a point sourse that will cover the entire tank with out a lot of drop off on the edges.

Steve

I read that post.. didn't go any farther than the first big discription. he is a salesman and while he isn't totaly BSing he is taking a lot of liberties with the truth. do I believe they make there own.. nope.. they oursourse them to a chineese company as per there specs.. unless they are part of a huge LED conglomerate they wouldnt me able to afford to leeps the lights at a reasonable price with limited runs.

there is a lot of 1/2 truths in that also..and whats the word I am looking for.. where you take something that is normal and make it sound like the newest and greates thing.. ie. them using constant current drivers.

he also talks about spectral shift of an LED.. they don't shift spectrums that is the best thing about them they only dim, and that amout is minimal at there rated life.

Steve

My thoughts exactly Phil. I think Mike31154 summed it up best for me in his last post. In the time since I started this thread to now, I've pretty much completed my DIY retrofit. All I wanted to know about was different colors for better coral growth not who's LEDs were best, who's drinkin' the kool aid and what not.

Sorry...I realize we took this thread for a bit of a ride. I hate to get into it but I'm not one to back down. Although I should learn that... :)