lux meter

[penkey49harley]

Does anyone have a suggestion for purchasing an inexpensive lux meter? IE: Amazon, Ebay, etc.

 

[jayball]

there are free smartphone apps that use the camera sensor. Lux meters are useless enough that free is all I would spend on them.

 

[mcgyvr]

Does anyone have a suggestion for purchasing an inexpensive lux meter? IE: Amazon, Ebay, etc.

yes.. amazon/ebay have tons of them for cheap..

But LUX is not PAR..

 

[cougareyes]

Lux meters aren't very useful in reef applications. They don't read reds or blues very well, they are mainly for visible light. The only use I found for them was to calibrate the 3 lights over my fowlr because they have a manual 2 channel control.

 

[Timfish]

Any cheap, waterproof lux meter will work fine for figuring relative intensity for corals. Lux and PAR meters are both just giving an average number for the entire visible spectrum so two light sources could have the same reading but very different spectrum. To be honest some of the above comments don't seem to be aware of the photobiology of corals. Take corals that look purple. It's a combination of blue and red chromoprotein which are reflecting (getting rid of) the blue and red wavelengths and absorbing (keeping) green and yellow light. (If a coral is using green and yellow shouldn't we measure that also?) And for fluorescing pigments the Stokes shift dictates green and yellow light for a orange or red proteins to fluoresce those colors. I would recommend looking up Dana Riddles articles for lots more info.

 

[penkey49harley]

Thank you very much. I appreciate the info.

 

[mcgyvr]

If corals were human eyes lux meters would be all one needs..
But they aren't..

 

[2smokes]

A lux meter is good to measure the bulbs from MH and T5 to see how much they loosed intensity.They are like 15 dollars on aliexpress and are verry acurate .

 

[DamonG]

Or, your local hydroponic shop has them also..

From note 5.. rip note 7

 

[penkey49harley]

Thanks everyone. I appreciate the info.

 

[smatter]

At $16.99 the HDE LX-1010B Digital Luxmeter is hard to beat. It's a great tool to give you a rough idea how bright your lights are. I'm at 50,000 lux midday at the surface. The sun is 100,000. I'd love to own a PAR meter, but for now this is much better than just guessing.

 

[penkey49harley]

That is a great option smatter. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[smatter]

You are welcome, and welcome to Reef Central!

 

[penkey49harley]

Thank you very much smatter. I appreciate it!