Advice On Led Lighting Please

[onlyslightlymad]

Right now I am in the middle of planning my next tropical setup. I have kept fish for about 15 years, all very much traditional old style in tank filters and heaters and T8 lighting etc., but since I ran down my old tank a couple of years ago to move house I have been fishless.

The plan this time is to build in to an existing wall cubby hole a 65L tank with an external filter and heater in a cupboard underneath. The practicalities of doing this are no problem, pretty straight forward really. The thing I want advice on is the lighting. Obviously with a fairly enclosed setup, T8's or T5's or Halide lamps are going to get pretty hot, so i was thinking of the LED route. I know there are plenty of ready available LED setups around but the are generally fairly bulky, I was looking for something a little more streamlined. I spotted this:

LED Strips

and thought this might be quite good. It comes in warm white and cool white and blue.

What are your thoughts? Any use?

Cheers.

 

[DrRob]

Best advice I can offer, having not done it...yet. Is to watch the lumen output. Compare them to the tubes you were thinking of and then work out if you can get enough to match above the tank. I suspect you'll be looking towards the entire roll.

Some of the high power LED's have a much better lumen output than the SMD strips.

Oh, and go for the cool white if anything, warm white is usually around 3000K and looks pretty yellow over a tank. The daylight bulbs you can buy are usually 6500k.