L.e.d Colours

[rfisher]

hi All,

With a few people making L.E.D light devices to illuminate their tanks after dark. I was just wondering what seems to be the most favourite colour and why you picked that colour?

Rich

 

[jarmado]

blue to replicate the moonlight colour.

 

[rfisher]

Did you consider Red or Green at all?

Rich

 

[jarmado]

Did you consider Red or Green at all?

Rich

i actually have the 3 sets from hydor - the blue, red and green.
i noticed that the blue gives a better effect and second is green.

 

[rfisher]

I was thinking of getting one of those. However I work in an engineering environment and L.E.D's are fairly easy to come by so I am going to make something myself. I also have access to something called a collimator which amplifies the light generated by the L.E.D's up to 20x. Not sure what the fish would make of it though.

Will post some pics eventually.

Thanks for your replies,

Rich

 

[jarmado]

good luck!

 

[king72]

I use the green one that is on an air pump and looks good at night. you can adjust the bubble speed/size too

 

[rfisher]

That must be one of Hydor ones, if my idea above doesn't work then I will probably purchase one of those.

Rich

 

[petpirate]

Shorter wavelengths penetrate water more easily. That is why blue is preferred for LED moonlighting.

 

[rfisher]

Shorter wavelengths penetrate water more easily. That is why blue is preferred for LED moonlighting.

Thanks for that, I didnt realise. I thought it was purely because of the way it makes the tank look.

Rich

 

[Callum]

do these lights help promote algae / damadge plants?

 

[Lateral Line]

Unless you go mad, there is not enough light from moonlight systems to trigger photosynthesis. It thus has neither positive or negative effect on plants/algae. Both higher plants and algae use dark periods for different metabolic purposes, so any marginal effect would affect both in any case.

 

[jtnova13]

with the LEDs, direct light will probably not look as good as if you got a cold cathode tube. A solution to this is to mount your LEDs with breadboard with a resistor on one side (you dont NEED the resistor) then take fine grit sand paper and sand/wetsand the tip of the LED down so the beam is dispersed better. I do this all the time in car audio installations.

 

[rfisher]

Hi,

Well you should be using a drop down resistor to protect the L.E.D from burning out. If not you risk burning the L.E.D out too quickly, which gives less ouput and will evebtually kill the L.E.D. The breadboard sounds like quite a good idea though, as you could then even out the spacing between the L.E.D's. Also if you were to get hold of wide angle L.E.D's then you would not need to sand down the top of the L.E.D.

Rich

 

[jtnova13]

true true, but wide angle LEDs are more expensive. If you look on ebay, you can get 50-100 blue LED's for i think like 10 bucks and sometimes they come packaged with the resistors for free. Bread board is cheap and easy to use. Hope you have some soldering skills though