Thank you for the info. Is there anyway you could get me the name and number of that contact. Also have you heard anything about successful growth of SPS w/LED's? This tank will be SPS dominant. Mike
Go to the aquaillumination site at
http://www.aquaillumination.com/
theres loads of info and specs on there.
The guy ive been communicating with is Chris Clough and it is basically his company. all his contact details are on the site. You will find him very helpful.
I found Solaris far less forthcoming with info. There is also an independant review on the right hand site of the page, conducted by riddle labs. If you take the time to soak it all up, you will realise that these lights are very powerful.
As far as keeping SPS, Chris tells me they are good to 24" on SPS and the review will show you how well they grow under this lighting.
A trawl around the web suggested that the Solaris, whist being a good light has a few issues that may be important for your setup.
Apart from apparent build quality, the cooling fans are on the ends of the unit, making it more difficult to build inside an enclosure if you intend to have full length lighting (recommended) as they cannot acheive a good air flow. I also led to beleive that the fans tend to blow air into the gap between the led unit and the cover glass and cause it and the LED's to dust up. As the led,s use silicone lenses, you dont want to be constantly cleaning them.
I would add of course that I have no practical experience of either light unit and all of this is purely from what ive read but people rarely critise their purchases without good reason, in fact the reverse is often true.
Finally, Chris spent an entire year getting the cooling right on his lighting and he also sent me the formulas for calculating the beam spread in the tank, to put my mind at rest over the way the tank would be illuminated.
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To get a better idea, you can plug in the tank depth dimensions into the following equations (where X is depth):
Width = 0.727 * X + 4.635
Length = 0.727 * X + 9.955
So, for example, if the tank is 24" deep, the spread would be 27.4" x 22" (L x W). These numbers are based on the design parameters, and not accounting for the effects of water, transmission loss, etc.
They seem to hold true though, as we have customers with 72" tanks that are 24" wide and 30" deep with great results.
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Hope it helps
