A sneak peak, LED lighting experiment
 

A sneak peak into what Ron and I have been working on for a while now.

With many hobbyists looking to save money on the LED emitters, we have decided to test out 4 different emitters, and using a brench mark emitter such as the CREE XR-Es to show if it is actually worth while or even efficient to use other brands for our application.

Generic Chinese Brand (there may be some higher PAR versions)
SemiLED
CREE XR-E
Edison

This test will allow us to see if its really worth saving the $3-5 on an emitter when paying $6 or so for the CREEs would actually benefit more in the long run as well as giving out greater PAR values.

The testing strip currently has: (fans to be added)

Generic Chinese Brand (there may be some higher PAR versions)
SemiLED
CREE XR-E

and a spare heatsink waiting for the edison starboards to arrive.

**Picture of the test strip running is useless as all the emitters end up looking the same, so until we get a chance to test the PAR (waiting for edisons to be hooked up) it is kind of pointless to show the test turned on.

If anyone is interested to see how different brand emitters perform we will have the test strip in the store for all that want to view it.

What we are going to do with this: This emitter test strip once completed will be put over a 4ft tank this tank will then have 4 pieces of SPS from the same colony as a bench mark coral. The experiment will show us and you guys(hobbyists) if investing in good emitters will be worth while and give all of us a chance to see how delicate corals such as SPS can do under LED lighting.

Some pictures of construction:

heatsink in place:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y29...s/DSC_0028.jpg

LEDs mounted:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y29...s/DSC_0030.jpg

generic LED with generic lenses (they dont stay so we had to use silicone to hold it in place)
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y29...s/DSC_0033.jpg

all lenses up:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y29...s/DSC_0037.jpg

Thanks for posting this Eugene. It was a long 5 hours hunched over this to get it built today but well worth it. Just to correct one small error, the emitters are generic chinese, SemiLed (not SSC) and Cree XR-E. The SemiLed are the same brand used in the Maxspect fixtures although we are using 60 degree optics and the Maxspect do not. You can see the difference in brightness by eye; I recommend wearing sunglasses when looking at the emitters! The Crees are definitely the brightest but as Eugene says we will be doing PAR measurements in water and testing on coral as that will tell the full story. I'm really excited to run this experiment and this will serve as a guide for selection of the emitters used in our Oceanic fixtures.

Sorry about that mistake regarding the SSCs haha...fixed now! As for Rons suggestion about looking at these emitters, please do wear some kind of shades to prevent from getting blinded...these are bright and during our test yesterday Ron blinded me a few times.

Have you guys seen the LED's from http://stevesleds.com/Pricing.html ?

At $2.15 each, they are very tempting. Only one third the cost of Cree's.

I think they are just another generic Chinese LED though so they'll probably be very similar to the ones you're already testing.

We havent seen those LEDs in action, however having seen our quick comparison between the generic chinese(GC) ones we got to the CREEs we are looking at at least half the intensity in the GC emitters to the CREE XR-Es and that is to the human eye as well. So if those emitters from stevesleds is GC emitters that are at $2.15/ea you would be trading price for performance imo. this is not to say that all chinese emitters are going to be as poor in performance as the ones we are testing. but a big percentage of them will be around this range.

I have seen them and he claims they have good output but I haven't seem numbers and at $2 each they are probably only slightly better then our generic ones I bought for $1.75 each. I may try to get hold of some for testing but they would likely not be my first choice for a system if I wanted to keep SPS or light a deeper tank.

this is a great topic.. i have always wondered how significant the performance difference was..

where did you guys purchase the chinese led's for $1.75? i would like to use those for a led refugium light..

Sorry, got the price wrong. They were actually $1.90 for the blues and $2.00 each for the whites from Satistronics.

But you get what you pay for. In my quick desktop tests the Cree XR-E had more than 2.5 time the output. Under my test conditions a single Cree XR-E cool white put out 130 PAR and a single cheap white LED put out 47 PAR. Big difference. In another test with the SemiLed emitters the Cree put out about 1.7 times more PAR then these particular ones. However, there are higher bin SemiLeds that I am hoping to get hold of that should be much closer in output to the Cree XR-E.