LED lighting for aquarium stores just makes sense. Their intense light output and color rendering properties do a wonderful job highlighting corals, and their energy efficiency makes them a no brainer for fish only systems. LEDs essentially provide the perfect blend of power, color, and efficiency…hence their intense surge in popularity over the past few years. Subscribing to this same ideology, the San Diego based fish store, Aquatic Warehouse, rennovated a large portion of their aquarium lighting. Branching away from the energy intensive metal halides, the store swapped out many of its light fixtures for Ecoxotic Cannon LED pendants, which have been sitting over their mixed SPS/LPS reef tank for more than six months now. Plunging into the LED craze even farther, the store also recently swapped out their T5HO and metal halide light fixtures for even more Cannon fixtures over their new coral holding systems. All of these LED lit systems can be seen in the amazingly shot video above.
As for the specific lights used, Aquatic Warehose chose the 100watt Photon Cannons with the elliptical reflectors. After seeing these in person on several ocassions, we can attest to their power and the reflector’s ability to really spread out the light.
Each aquarium setup gets a pair of these pendants, with one being 12,000K white and the other 455nm Royal Blue. To further show just how well these LEDs work, the 12K white pendants are actually dimmed down to 40% intensity. According to the video’s description, this dimming was done simply to enhance the coloration in the corals…and it certainly works well.
The mixed reef showtank described at the top of the article matches the lighting scheme of the coral growout tanks. It is illuminated by one 12,000K white and one 455nm blue Cannon pendant, and the store reports that the growth and color have been amazing over the six months the lights have been in use.
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