Just picked up the new Hydra 26 HD from Your Reef. Did a quick hanging mount for the wife's 29gBiocube. It's about 12" off the water and have it running on an ultra low wattage 14.5k spectrum. I believe it said the wattage was about 19 watts.
I absolutely love the AiFi the setup was super simple using the Android app. It connected to my phone and after about 10 mins of easy setup was connected to my WiFi router and the Ai cloud and I even had the perfect lighting settings for the way I wanted it to look.
What I see as great improvements from the last version.
Built in WiFi and no controller or director needed.
Less whites and more blue Led's
AiFi app worked 100% from the start
Pretty much unlimited expansion (first light installs as parent and if you want can run as many other lights without further programming if you set them as child to the parent)
Spectral control, if your not sure how you want to set your color spectrum just hit the top right icon while your in setup or manual mode and you can adjust using color temperature and or wattage/intensity to find your desired look.
HyperDrive, this is a cool feature. Since the unit has a 90 watt power supply and the Led's can handle more than what's assigned to them when they are 100% Ai gives you the ability to take advantage of spare power if you have it available. So like most of us we crank the whites, reds, and greens down. That leaves power on the table. So as soon as you turn down those channels you will see the slider over your other channels get bigger and allow you to go over the normal 100% while at the same time showing you how much of the 90 watts (on the 26 more on the 52) you are using. Now I probably won't use this on the 29gBiocube but if I ever use this light on a bigger tank I will definitely use this feature.
Cons vs Old Hydra
This one is like $25 more (more than worth it)
Nothing else
With the coverage of this unit being 24x24 and having experienced the previous model on my 180 when I got away with only running 3 at $300 each and able to grow sps wherever I wanted in the tank. I would say this light is an excellent choice for anyone running tanks from 30 gallons to 300 gallons and I truly feel it is the most economical way to get great coverage for a decent price. Seeing that you can buy 2 of these for the price of 1 radion and 2 of these would cover and entire 4' 120gal tank and 1 radion would not. Sorry for crappy pic but the light had been off for a while when I decided to write this. But i hrad to after being really impressed on how quickly this installed and setup this afternoon.
Sam
I absolutely love the AiFi the setup was super simple using the Android app. It connected to my phone and after about 10 mins of easy setup was connected to my WiFi router and the Ai cloud and I even had the perfect lighting settings for the way I wanted it to look.
What I see as great improvements from the last version.
Built in WiFi and no controller or director needed.
Less whites and more blue Led's
AiFi app worked 100% from the start
Pretty much unlimited expansion (first light installs as parent and if you want can run as many other lights without further programming if you set them as child to the parent)
Spectral control, if your not sure how you want to set your color spectrum just hit the top right icon while your in setup or manual mode and you can adjust using color temperature and or wattage/intensity to find your desired look.
HyperDrive, this is a cool feature. Since the unit has a 90 watt power supply and the Led's can handle more than what's assigned to them when they are 100% Ai gives you the ability to take advantage of spare power if you have it available. So like most of us we crank the whites, reds, and greens down. That leaves power on the table. So as soon as you turn down those channels you will see the slider over your other channels get bigger and allow you to go over the normal 100% while at the same time showing you how much of the 90 watts (on the 26 more on the 52) you are using. Now I probably won't use this on the 29gBiocube but if I ever use this light on a bigger tank I will definitely use this feature.
Cons vs Old Hydra
This one is like $25 more (more than worth it)
Nothing else
With the coverage of this unit being 24x24 and having experienced the previous model on my 180 when I got away with only running 3 at $300 each and able to grow sps wherever I wanted in the tank. I would say this light is an excellent choice for anyone running tanks from 30 gallons to 300 gallons and I truly feel it is the most economical way to get great coverage for a decent price. Seeing that you can buy 2 of these for the price of 1 radion and 2 of these would cover and entire 4' 120gal tank and 1 radion would not. Sorry for crappy pic but the light had been off for a while when I decided to write this. But i hrad to after being really impressed on how quickly this installed and setup this afternoon.
Sam
