A month or so ago I picked up a couple green XP-Es, a couple Osram 660nm reds, and a couple violets at 390-420 nm. For a test I wired them up to a Mean Well LPC-35-700 to run them at 700 ma. All of them were mounted to a heat sink that allowed me to hold the fixture alongside of my current LED rig. It allowed a good A-B comparison of my tank with these added, and without.
The my base "without" setup is the following XR-Es:
- 6 Neutral White
- 2 Cool White
- 2 Blue
- 14 Royal Blue
I tested by holding the test fixture with the green, red, and violet beside the normal fixture. The normal fixture I ran at 100% (1000 ma) and with nothing but RBs running at 100 ma.
I'm very comfortable saying I did not like the results. Did not like the color rendition. So I changed my testing. I used black electrical tape over optics to cover the new LEDs (green, red, violet) one at a time, and two at a time. So I repeated the original test (base setup at 1000 ma all LEDs, and 100 ma just RBs) with the following additional colors:
- red alone
- green alone
- violet alone
- red and green
- red and violet
- green and violet
And since the LEDs I was testing were mounted to a their own small heatsink, I was able to view it with it next to my regular fixture, and to bring it to the front of the tank, putting it next to the glass and close to may corals, or lower it close to the surface of the water. Both had an amplifying effect on those particular colors.
My conclusions?
- Green is NOT needed. With the CW and NW I'm running now. Not only does it not add, it overpowers with green. Someone posted this 20-30 posts ago. Sorry I can't find it to give you credit. But I'm in full agreement.
- Red helps, but only in limited color ranges. And in the ranges it does help, it can be dramatic. Generally I could not see the effect, but I've got a red serpent star that exploded with color under the reds.
- Violet can have a dramatic effect on making colors pop, but it has to be a lot of violet. yeldarbj has posted this, and I'm in full agreement. I really only saw the effect when I held the fixture close to the tank, but then it was wonderful and did not turn the tank a purple or violet color. It only made some colors much brighter.
Not sure how I'm going to incorporate this into my fixture. I'll add in a couple of reds. And I'm going to have to figure out a way to add a bunch of violets because if you get enough of it, it looks great. And the greens... they're going in the trash bin.