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New LED advice

1

13r0wn7

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Joined
31 Dec 2013
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151
Location
Richmond North yorkshire
I have just bought a custom LED light and I am unsure of the intensity and distance from the substrate the light should be.

My tank is 120lx30wx46d
Light from substrate now is 55cm

I have been looking at the graph but as it's customised it's hard to choose one.

The light has 4 channels and I can change the intensity 1-99 on each channel and have 9 separate times.

The LED Is made up of 48x3W Crees. The layout it's on the picture Below.
The brackets indicate what channel the lights on.

I previously had 54x1w led 6400k beamsworks and I Believe that's why I had algae issues as I was unable to change the hight and intensity.

Any input of what you would do would be helpful
5zr6uo.png

sesegepy.jpg

e2a6urum.jpg
ebyzenub.jpg



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Last edited:
You'll need to lower the intensity way down. I would suggest dropping it down to around 15% of max power, for a max of 6 hours per day.
 
I have a similar setup as you check the stats here. As you can see from that thread my tank started to develop a bad case of Diatom.
To control the diatoms I did a soft three day blackout and then reduce LED power setting to 25% of max power.
This helped but over the next few weeks Diatoms starting coming back. In the end I needed to reduce the power to 15% to get them under
control. You're working with 48 x 3 watt Crees twice the amount of power I started with. At 15% your plant will feel much better and you won't
be fighting Brown/Diatom algea problems.

Hope that helps.
 
On a 150 cm tank I used 45x3W LEDs about 50cm above the surface on 100% and that was on a low tech and it was absolutely fine, some plants didn't get enough light when it got overgrown.

So 15% is low enough if this is a high tech. But you don't have enough plants at the moment and you don't have floating plants so I'd set it on 7-8 hrs. and dial the light down. Use the plants as your guide, as long as the plants grow healthy and relatively fast you are fine. If any sort of algae appears, the minimum of it, dial further down.
 
Thanks for your advice. I currently have it set to 30% on 16x3w LEDs(6k) and 20% on 16x10k LEDs see how it goes. As this is a new light i am hoeing for improvement in the next few weeks if not i will decrease more!
 
48x3W = 144W of light! That's a heck of a lot of light. Will be interested to see what setting you end up with.

JPC
 
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