Chuck's 150 Gallon Reef Project

[mseepman]

Chuck, somewhere here I missed the part where you robbed a bank...2 Solaris? Jealousy would be an understatement!

[ChuckG]

LOL - Ah, the power of plastic.

My next thread will be "Let's see how long it takes Chuck to get out of debt".

[phlounder]

They got your name on the bulletin board in the back room there at Solaris. Only person in the country with two Solaris fixtures. Ha!

[ChuckG]

I wondered when you were going to chime in.

I highly doubt I'm the only one with two.

I was thinking about what light to put on my frag tank and when I weighed things out, it seemed like another solaris was the way to go.

I won't have light shock fragging from the display and going into the frag tank.
If I used MH's on the frag tank then I would be adding a lot of heat to the tank water as well as the small room that holds the frag tank. This room would then help heat the frag tank, the fuge, the back of the display as well one of the sumps. I would probably have to use the chiller then and I'm right back to an energy guzzler which I am trying to avoid this time arouind. Once I saw first hand that the solaris does not add any heat to the tank - it was a no brainer. It does have some heat that exits and will go into the room but if it's a problem then I'll vent it into the wall or something.

[ReefSilly]

Chuck, somewhere here I missed the part where you robbed a bank...2 Solaris? Jealousy would be an understatement!

Really

LOL - Ah, the power of plastic.

Two led Solaris

[ChuckG]

Hey - that's kewl. Must be one of the new smilies.

[Tangboy]

Chuckg doens't have to rob banks, he just steals the Playboys instead of putting them in the mailboxes and ebays them! I bet you have seen some pretty interesting mail in your days eh?! Awesome light fixtures, Solaris the way to go these days?

[DaveK]

Originally Posted by Tangboy

... Awesome light fixtures, Solaris the way to go these days?

I've posted the information before, and I apologize to Chuck for posting the same opinion again.

In my opinion, LED lighting will become a standard method of lighting a reef. To day, now, you are seeing the first generation of LED aquarium lighting. Yes, it's goof, but give it a few years. You'll see much better LED lighting at far lower cost.

I did the math on another post on this topic . In effect using LED lighting give you a savings in electricity bills. Even so, a solaris lighting system takes about 7 years to pay for itself.

[Tangboy]

Ahh yes, I remember this on another post started by Banded Shark or something like that. Sorry for making ya post again. Too much information this summer from classes... yeah that's the story i'll go with!

[ChuckG]

I will be the first to admit now that I have them that they definately still do have some issues with them. For the price you now have to pay you would expect everything to work with no problems whatsoever. There are still even programming bugs in them. You have to turn them off every couple of weeks to clear the memory. You have to remember when setting certain features like the clock to set the hour, min and sec. If you just set one of them then for some reason the unit will hang up switching from day to night and back to day. There are heat issues with the power units especially with the new series that equals the 400 watt MH's. They are getting some better power units in at the end of the month.

I will say that the company is standing behind their units 100%. People that are experiencing problems will receive new power units or whatever is necessary to make things right.

I am still not sorry that I went ahead and bought into it but I also believe that Dave is correct in that in a few years you will be able to get a bug free system at a much lower cost.

I'd like to see that math breakdown showing a 7 yr payoff however. At this point, I believe that it will be less.