# Lighting?



## Mohlerbear (Feb 20, 2014)

I think this place is the better option for my questions about lighting. Since it's really all about the plant growth. 
First off I wanna say, I am not bashing firstrays LEDs, by any means! I have only owned jungle dawns, beamsworks and now two of these LEDs by Ray. So I am limited on what lights work well or that I tend to be biased too, since I own only a couple different kinds. 
I bought two of these vivarium lights and they arrived yesterday. Well I plugged one in over a grow out tank to see what it looked like. My initial plan was to use one 13w jungle dawn led and one of these Rays LEDs over my new 20h verts. 
When I plugged it in, I noticed the red led. There weren't a lot but at least 6-9 off the top of my head. It kindaaaaaa made the tank a little reddish/pinkish. I was thinking the jungle dawn would balance it out. Which I will see tonight if it does. 

So my ultimate question is, are these good for dart frog vivariums? Should I stick with JD or some other reputable LED bulbs in the hobby? Would a JD 13w maybe balance out the red on the new led?
Plant people...let me hear your opinions!
Thank you

LED-Vivarium-Grow-Lamp


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## 55105 (Jan 27, 2015)

Looks like they add red LEDs for flowering. Kind of seems like a gimmick IMO. There is a process for flowering and as far as I know adding a few extra always on red LEDs isn't going to make much difference. 

If the red bugs you, which I can imagine it would then just get more JDs.

Also, I'm no physicist -_- but I do not believe you can cancel out light with more light - if that makes any sense.


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## Mohlerbear (Feb 20, 2014)

port_plz said:


> Looks like they add red LEDs for flowering. Kind of seems like a gimmick IMO. There is a process for flowering and as far as I know adding a few extra always on red LEDs isn't going to make much difference.
> 
> If the red bugs you, which I can imagine it would then just get more JDs.
> 
> Also, I'm no physicist -_- but I do not believe you can cancel out light with more light - if that makes any sense.



True, I wasn't sure if I could or if it would balance it out. I'm kicking myself for not lighting up both at the same time over the grow out. Then I would've known. 
I do believe this are beneficial for orchid growth and the downside is that I have zero orchids in my enclosures. 
Dude thanks for your input. I'm leaning towards sending them back. 


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## 55105 (Jan 27, 2015)

I think they could *potentially be beneficial. However, orchids require low temps for flowering which is pretty rare indoors, especially in a vivarium.

I guess the takeaway is that it's fun to try to re-bloom orchids, but I'm not keeping my house at 60 degrees just to have a chance at having some flowers.

You also have to have a fertilizer regime which again, would be tough to pull off in a vivarium.

This is why I say it's a gimmick... The chances of getting a orchid to bloom in a vivarium is very, very low but people will try anything to get those blooms back.


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## RandallW201 (Jun 27, 2014)

From my somewhat long experience with planted aquariums is that the red color spectrum is what the plants truly benefit from the most to photosynthesize. Now, I don't know all the science and professional lingo on the topic. But what I do understand is that plants benefit more from red and blue light spectrum more than any color. Green is actually the color that is the least beneficial to them. 

But to answer the question, I think a jungle dawn will definitely help. I've always used the rosette/red/pink T5HO's on my planted aquaria and added a full spectrum or "daylight" bulb with more of a cooler blue peak in the spectrum to help balance out the colors and make it more pleasing to the eyes.


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## Mohlerbear (Feb 20, 2014)

Dammit I sent in a request to return it. Haha. Well I'll have to try it Randall and see if it balances it out. Thank you!


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## 55105 (Jan 27, 2015)

RandallW201 said:


> From my somewhat long experience with planted aquariums is that the red color spectrum is what the plants truly benefit from the most to photosynthesize. Now, I don't know all the science and professional lingo on the topic. But what I do understand is that plants benefit more from red and blue light spectrum more than any color. Green is actually the color that is the least beneficial to them.
> 
> But to answer the question, I think a jungle dawn will definitely help. I've always used the rosette/red/pink T5HO's on my planted aquaria and added a full spectrum or "daylight" bulb with more of a cooler blue peak in the spectrum to help balance out the colors and make it more pleasing to the eyes.


Easy to remember... Blue = growth / Red = flowering. It has to do with seasonal variations of natural sunlight. In summer there is more blue light which triggers vegetative growth. In fall there is more red which triggers flowering.

Unless you have flowering plants extra red light is not necessary IMO. Plus it looks kind of unnatural for display purposes.


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## 55105 (Jan 27, 2015)

This explains it very simply


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## Mohlerbear (Feb 20, 2014)

port_plz said:


> This explains it very simply



Fantastic article. Yeah I guess since I have nothing that'll be flowering, it isn't really needed. Alright, back to returning them. Ha. I am gonna order a 20w 16" led from tincman in replacement of the lights this thread is about, the Ray LED lights


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## Mohlerbear (Feb 20, 2014)

Yeah i definitely don't want it to look unnatural. Kinda defeats the purpose ya know. 


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## Ctoliva (Apr 4, 2015)

If $ is not a problem I would tryout a Kessil they do wonders with my planted aquariums and there spectrums are for plants they are also dimmible so you can have sunrise and sunset.


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## Weston (Mar 21, 2015)

Just to reaffirm what's been said and add a little: You have to remember that when right/blue is being discussed in terms of the light benefit to plants, it's the wavelengths of light that matter, not the literal color which is visible, per se. That article summed it up well: Certain types of fluorescent bulbs emit more light in a given part of the visible spectrum. We see this as light that appears "warmer" or "cooler," but it's still "white light." 
In most cases (all cases I can think of off hand), colored light only appears the given color because it's filtered. In terms of plant growth this does not function the same way. Unless I am mistaken, most LEDS in use are essentially still running white light through a filter to get the color.


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## Pubfiction (Feb 3, 2013)

Most common LEDs we buy are made by using a very efficient blue LED. This blue LED is then coated on the top with a phosphor coating. The blue light goes up, hits the phosphors and excites them and shifts to green and red light. However like most things in life this is not a 100% efficient process, lots of the blue light passes through the phosphors as well. This gives us the characteristic LED spectrum which you can see by simply playing with white LEDs on the build my led web page. If you do this you will see a blue spike followed by a lack of light in the 470 nm range then a hump of green which tapers off into red. You will notice that red is often the weakest part of any white LED spectrum. 

Typically higher kelvin LEDs just have more of the blue passing through them creating a large spike in blue around this this begs a very interesting question why would anyone add blue LEDs to and LED that is already blue? Why not just have less of the phosphor coating or rebalance it? This is the principle I believe is behind first rays LEDs. Add red and use higher kelvin LEDs get a more balanced spectrum. 

Now if you don't like the light? then just get rid of it after all the real reason we light dart frog tanks with white lights is our own pleasure cause the frogs like don't give a rip and the plants would grow in purple light and I have frogs breeding happily in sealed unlit glass fish tanks and plastic totes. But at the same time I would caution you and ask do you really not like the light or are you just surprised because it is different than you expected? Different doesn't always mean bad. Do you look at a jungle dawn and say oh that looks just like the jungle floor? Compare the first rays light to outdoor lighting on a bright day in color. Do the same with other lights you have. 

It is also worth mentioning that there is not just red green blue and white there are many shades or different wavelengths something that is often totally missed. Check out the finnex planted plus which unlike many red supplemented lights uses 660 nm reds which are further red where the red is more lacking on LEDs.


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## Pubfiction (Feb 3, 2013)

Stuff like this comes up a lot so I decided to whip up an image to portray this. 










All but the first rays spectrum were generated at the buildmyled.com custom configurator. So what do you want to see here? Well first the top row are single diode spectra, basically what you get when you have a typical LED you buy at the store with all 1 type of LED in it. You can see here what I mentioned above the only difference between more or less kelvin temperature is how big that blue spike is compared to the rest of the light and its skew to red. 

The second row contains 2 LEDs that one would consider something to be desired in an LED spectrum. The first is the dutch planted 6300K, I personally think this is a good light for dart froggers its targeted at the tropical plant hobby and one would think light at the edge of a water way in a tropical rainforest is something like what we might like for our dart frogs. The second is a light that they have made to target scientific researchers who want to most closely approximate the sun for plant growth. Also something we should probably aspire too and it looks pretty flat and balanced to me with very little in the way of holes in its spectrum compared to most LEDs. 

The last row is what we see often in this hobby. The jungle dawn is of course my best guess at what the spectrum looks like based on information I could dig up since a spectrum has not been released and the first rays was taken from his website and squashed to make it about the same size as the others to compare. I would also assume that beamswork, joshsfrogs, tincman and Bnice produce something that is like the 6500K in the top row. And the finnex ray 2 is also a squashed image of something finnex released. If I can come across more spectra I will add them.


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## MrMycetes (Nov 9, 2014)

Get a Kessil, problem solved. You don't have to worry about light spectrum, intensity, heat, or penetrating power.


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## MrMycetes (Nov 9, 2014)

You want to look at a few things when doing lights for plant use: Micromol/sec/m3, or how many photons are being put out by the light source per second per square meter, as well as the PAR rating, or Photosynthetically Active Radiation. PAR is the portion of light which the plant will use. Kessil's have huge micromol/sec/m3, some of which put out more photons per square meter than the sun itself. A high PAR, however, will give you a light that is really magenta/purple, so just look for something high PAR, but also pleasant to look at.


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