Thinking of switching to this LED set-up for my 90

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ucerider

undercover reefer
thinking of doing 3 for now cause im gonna upgrade to a 120 in a few months then ill prob do 4 thats how much they run for at my lfs but im still doing research on it to see if itll be worth it in the long run since im running 2 250 MH and with summer being around the corner it heats up my house alot and i end with very high pg&e bills
 

Ace25

www.centralcoastreefclub. com
Oct 3, 2005
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www.centralcoastreefclub.com
From doing real world tests on LEDs it isn't a whole lot of savings in power. On paper it seems like a lot of savings, but the reality is different, mainly because certain drivers (Mean Well) are very inefficient for some reason. I have read other drivers for LEDs are a lot better, but I have not tried any others myself to know how true that is. On a 12 LED string of lights, at max that should only be 36w worth of power, plus a little for the overhead on the driver, but my Kill-a-Watt tells me that 12 Cree XP-G Cool whites on a driver takes up 70w, XP-E Royal blues take 58w. I switched out 6 24" T5HOs on my 29G for 24 LEDs.. the 6 T5s took about 150w in power, the LEDs take around 120w of power on average. So not a whole lot of savings on the power bill from the lights, but you will save $ by not having to run a chiller like you would with MH lights and also bulb replacement cost on LEDs is a ton cheaper, ie. $50-$100 for a MH bulb vs $3-$7 for an LED. Some LEDs will fail much sooner than the 50,000 hour claim.. I have had 2 die within 2 months already but it only took me about 5 minutes and $12 to replace them. On my setup, the LEDs become very ineffecient when going above 80% of their max power. The drivers get VERY hot when run above 80% and you gain very little extra light output in that last 20%. So it is better to put more LEDs than you would need but only run them around 50% power to get the most savings on power, but you shell out a lot more out of your wallet initially to do that, which kind of offsets the benefits for quite some time (year or two).
 
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