Any stock LED fixture for home lighting generally will not do. This is because of the difference between LED and fluorescent, the latter being based on mercury and requires phosphors to bring the light into the visible bandwidth, resulting in a broad spectrum, generally. LED fixtures tuned to a specific wavelength or made to reflect a Kelvin rating similar to incandescent, fluorescent, or HID do not look the same when compared side-to-side (talking residential/commercial lighting here). Colors may pop more or less. They have actually had to go back and re-invent color rendering matrices due to LED lighting because the end result is so different.
What you need for algal growth under LEDs is a plant growth specific fixture. There are several different types of these, some are advertised for "budding and flowering" and some for "grow-out" or leaf-growth stages. The latter generally applies for algae because it is primarily red bandwidth, the flowering stage fixtures usually have a lot of blue and white and some UV thrown in there, good for plants, useless for algae.
A fixture with mostly red (630nm or 660nm, the latter more commonly used right now) and maybe a few blues thrown in will look very pink with a little purple tinge. Turn one on in a room and it looks like an alien has turned on a death ray or something. When you turn it off everything looks very green.
I just got one of the e-shine fixtures to compare to my custom LED fixture. Last night I used a PAR meter to compare the e-shine fixture to a Nova Extreme 1127 T5HO 2-lamp fixture. I'll probably post those results on the advanced thread sometime today...very interesting
