Thread: Orphek or AI
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Old 05-18-2011, 03:36 AM
mr.wilson mr.wilson is offline
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I have an AI Sol with a dimmer. It was fun to play with to establish what colour I wanted, but after 10 minutes I had no further use for it. I have a profilux controller but the lightning and cloud effects are not of any interest to me.

I also have some plasma lights from Straylight with dimmers. If I dim the light it becomes more blue, but at the cost of most of the PAR. I leave them at full power as most users will. They are horribly yellow but I'm using them for mangroves and Chaeto.

Dimming a light to acclimate new corals only stresses out your old corals. As someone else mentioned, raising the light will give you the same drop in intensity while spreading the coverage.

Dimming also alters the spectrum of the light so the advertised CRI, PAR and PUR numbers go out the window. Dimming alters the milliamps available to the LED chip from the driver. This means you may for example end up with proportionately higher amounts of yellow light in the 520-630nm range which will cause nuisance algae problems. This isn't necessarily what would happen, but you certainly won't get the same peaks and lows that are measured in the spectrograph of the light at full power. Drivers are sized specifically to LEDs to get peak performance. Even optical lenses are matched to peak performance to get the most out of the LEDs. Many LED lights are not bright enough in the first place so dimming is really a moot point. By the time you get the light high enough above the water's surface to get good coverage there really isn't much left to dim in many cases.

I use 450 nm blue light for dawn and dusk and turn the white lights on and off in sequence, right (rising in the East) and left (setting in the West) to follow the pattern of the sun. Obviously you can't do this if you are only using one fixture, but most people are using three or more.

Lighting is always a tough decision, I think tougher than protein skimmer selection and picking a wife. It's an expensive move and you're always nervous that something new will outmode what you buy. LED technology has plateaued, and broken away from its early pioneer days just a year ago. Some manufacturers are clearly better than others, but I don't think any of the brands you have mentioned here will disappoint you.
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