Plant growth LED lighting

[erwinx]

I found this interesting link. Is there any application to aquariums? Can we duplicate the effect by simply purchasing from Ebay a 5050 LED strip that allows us to change colours? (I don't have science background, so sorry if this is a silly question).


http://www.ledworks.sg/uploads/3/4/0...olio-small.pdf

[Urban Aquaria]

I've also been looking into DIY light systems too, maybe i can chime in with some thoughts on it.

Just changing the color of lights may not necessarily create the correct combination of spectrums for growing plants. LED lights usually have to be tuned to output certain plant-growth specific light spectrums (which we may not be able to see) so that plants can use more of the light efficiently, or else most of the light is wasted (and encourage algae to flourish instead).

Those types of horticulture LED lights (like in your link) would definitely be ideal for growing plants, but the ones i've also seen so far are mainly designed for growing plants emersed in indoor or hydroponics farms, not sure how well they fare with plants that are underwater though.

In addition, horticulture LED lights tend to have a purplish hue, which is okay for farming purposes or if just focused on growing plants, though the color looks abit odd if used in a display scaped tank with fishes.

Plant growth specific lights for aquarium use are usually designed with specific spectrums and for additional depth penetration through water.

I guess for such light choices, the costs and setup are factors to consider (usually its easier to just get plant-growth LED lights designed for aquarium use)... i'd also be keen to see if anyone has used such horticulture LED lights in their aquariums and whether it worked well for them too.

[Shadow]

The question is whether you want to simply grow plants or scaping? If you just want to grow plants then you need to choose the light which have peak spectrum that coincide with photosynthetic spectrum. Thus maximize the plants grow. However, I personally think any light other than white is painful to my eyes

[Urban Aquaria]

I happened to drive by bukit timah area and popped by the company that supplies those plant-growth LED lights in the posted link, managed to check out the LED lights themselves:



Its quite interesting stuff, as you can see in the photo i took above, the various LED configurations for different plant growth patterns come in different specific spectrum mixes (the resulting output color range from bluish to purplish to pinkish).

The plant-growth LED lights are actually only the size of a small postage stamp. What the company does is customize the LEDs with fixtures to setup them up for customers (with housing, wiring and transformer). The staff there mentioned it'll cost around S$100-$150 for one LED unit (depending on the fixture choices)... not sure how much area one unit will cover though and still no idea if they are effective for plants in aquarium tanks.

If anyone has the spare $$$ to get a few of those light sets to try out, do post your experiences using them in planted tanks.