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Re: [APD] Off Topic: LED lights



Hi Folks,

I'm mostly a lurker on this list, but now and then a lighting topic
piques my interests.

I think the time may be near for using LED lighting in the aquarium
hobby.  A company called Lumileds, which created the "Luxeon" power
led some years ago recently released a new product called the "Rebel".
  The rebel is set to leave all previous led technologies in the dust,
but they're darn difficult to work with, as each led is smaller than a
grain of rice.  These leds are in the order of 1 to 2 watts, with
efficacy of over 100 lumens/watt, ranking them right up there with the
best metal halide has to offer.  Knowing the fact that the rebels
entire output is directed at roughly 120 degrees opposed to the 360
degree emission of a metal halide bulb, the end result is twice as
much light (per watt of heat) compared to MH.

I'm waiting on some collimating optics and then I'll set out at trying
to figure out how to use these little gems to light up my 29 gallon
tank.  I have two ideas I want to try:

1) Form "clusters" of three leds, one each of red, blue and green,
using a special optics package designed for primary color mixing.
This should allow me to control the exact color balance of the light,
so I can adjust it to my personal tastes.  The downside to this
approach is increased complexity of managing three separate light
sources.

2) Same cluster of three as above, but mixing white, red and green, I
will use the "white" led (which is blue with yellow phosphors) to
provide the bulk of the illumination and the red and green to adjust
the color balance.  There major industrial drive right now to produce
blindingly bright white leds, so finding a way to harness that would
be an advantage.

The optics I'm waiting on were announced a few weeks ago, and should
be in distribution by July.  So I've got a bit of time yet to do more
planning!

Gordon
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