LEDs and Moonlight

[kilralpine]

So I just found a neat little setup, apparently advance auto (my workplace) stocks some car LED accent lighting in a few different colors (red, amber, magenta, blue, green, and a few other disgusting colors. I decided magenta would be a pretty cool moonlight color, installed and now im using about 12 total, these are not high power leds however they are quite bright; not as bright as the cheap blue leds I used to have laying around though; my question is this. How can you tell if the lights are intrusive to their cycle, in other words how can you tell if fish are being kept awake or disturbed, same to corals. It almost felt as if my candy canes extended polyps less last night with a very small amount of pinkish lighting as opposed to pure darkness. This could just be shear chance with the canes, and I will check again tonight; Thanks guys!

 

[jbdreefs]

I have used the same lights. Are you talking about the strips? I found them.to be too bright so i pointed them upwards. After this, the amount of light seemed appropriate.

 

[kilralpine]

It is they are manufactured by alpina and yea they are quite bright despite the sad quality of the leds lol. I may try this tonight or put some type of mesh filter over them.

 

[dakota9]

are these sealed LED strips?

I have a sealed LED strip of white LEDs I wanted to use as moon lights, so I stuck a blue strip of painters tape over the LEDs, which was still too bright, so I put another strip of tape on them....

Painter's Masking Tape comes in Blue, Purple, and another color I believe, so you could experiment with which color combo you like best. A strip of plain masking tape would even work to dull down the intensity of any LED color that was too intense. It's cheap too.

 

[kilralpine]

I made no changes to the LEDs today and going into tonight, everything looks pretty normal so I am thinking these aren't too powerful. Fish are sleeping and the canes are feeding like normal .

 

[kirkwood]

i started a thread a few weeks back asking if anyone had tried Red LEDs for the nocturnal hours. I saw an aquarium product for red LED moonlights that stated the red light did not interfere with anything. I thought it could be a cool experiment to run it during the off hours to get better visuals of polyp extension, CUC activity, and to inspect for unwanted hitchhikers. I currently run 10x3watt blue LEDs over a 120 for moonlight and the coral polyps retract.