New LED Lamp

[isurus79]

Oh, I forgot to ask this: Do you think these bulbs will fit in incandescent aquarium hoods? Say, 10 gallon size?

[Ray]

Originally Posted by isurus79

Oh, I forgot to ask this: Do you think these bulbs will fit in incandescent aquarium hoods? Say, 10 gallon size?

Assuming the hood has two fixtures facing each other at the ends of the same "tunnel", I don't see why not.

They're all gone now, but more are on the way...

[caleb316]

I know little about these lamps but used to grow under HID lights and the most important feature was the foot candles. How do these 13W bulbs compare to let's say a 400W HID light. Just getting back into orchids and am intrigued by these lights.

[DavidCampen]

Originally Posted by caleb316

I know little about these lamps but used to grow under HID lights and the most important feature was the foot candles. How do these 13W bulbs compare to let's say a 400W HID light. Just getting back into orchids and am intrigued by these lights.

I don't know about HID lights (are you talking about sodium or metal-halide?).

As for fluorescent lamps vs LED arrays, someone needs to make detailed photometric measurements to compare T5HO fluorescent against white LED arrays. It would need to be more than a single point measurement, you would have to place each at a fixed height over an area with a grid layout and measure the light intensity at element of the grid to get a value of foot-candle*square-foot that you then sum to get a value of foot-candle*square-foot for each fixture.

From what I can tell; current white LEDs or T5 or T8 fluorescent lamps all have about the same efficiency in converting watts of input power to watts of (visible spectrum) photons. Fluorescent lamps though, compared to LEDs, waste some of these photons by emitting the light over all surfaces of the bulb whereas LEDs direct all of their output forward. So a bare fluorescent lamp without any reflector would probably be less than 1/2 as effective as an LED array in delivering photons to plants underneath. I don't know anything about the effectiveness of fluorescent lamp fixture reflectors but I would guess that compared to a fluorescent light fixture with a good reflector an LED array would be no more than twice as effective per watt of input power and probably even less, maybe only 1.5 times as effective.

If you are willling to use an LED array that emits only deep red light at about 660 nm then you can get about double the effectiveness of white LED arrays.