Forgive any spelling or punctuation errors i’m on mobile. most of the tanks that I’ve set up in the past I’ve tried to save money where I could buy buying used equipment I usually would buy used lighting equipment.
Over the years I’ve gotten experience building gaming PCs and worked with a number of different cooling solutions for CPUs both air cooling and liquid cooling I’ve also tinkered with many different brands of pc case fans at different price points and noise performance levels.
What I have come to realize after working with computers is the poor quality of the lighting equipment that we have in this hobby.
Some of it is really poorly designed and this became apparent again with my recent purchase for my new tank that I just set up a couple weeks ago.
I decided to splurge and bought some new light equipment. I bought two units of the AI prime 16 HD for my IM30L. As I slowly cranked up the intensity percentages to acclimate the corals, I noticed that the fans on these little things are super loud.
They are easily pushing 60-70 dB. Maybe more. I begin to wonder what I can do to improve the noise levels. maybe doing some type of fan mod swapping out the fan for a better fan etc. I popped the little screen fan cover off and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
AI truly went for form over function on these things, sacrificing cooling performance for a Compact form factor. The heat sink is ridiculously bad. Very small surface area for the wattage with a undersized cheap fan with a cheap bearing.
I’m only running the LED at 75% power and the fans run at a constant 100%.
I’m just bummed. I’m not engineer, but I could vastly improve the cooling performance on these little things. Give it a larger heat sink with more fins, thinner fins, and a larger, higher quality fan with a better bearing.
This reminds me of when I bought a used ATI T5 fixture. Got it home and fired it up. Couldn’t believe the amount of fan noise coming off what was originally several hundred dollar german designed light. I ordered replacement fans thinking “these must just be defective.” Opened up the fan brackets and see a junk chinese fan with a rifle bearing (cheapy) that must have cost them $0.75 each. Imagine a high end several hundred dollar German light with $0.75 Chinese fans. The idea of it is offensive.
I think generally people aren’t too familiar with this tech and fans and don’t really understand just how lousy these products are. I’m debating returning the AI Primes. Even if I did a fan mod with some high quality Noctua fans, the limitations of the garbage design heat sink would still hold it back.
Even at 100% intensity, the fan should not be running at 100% rpm for the entire time. A good design would allow you to run max intensity and have the fans only hit 75% max rpm or something along those lines. Really disappointed. We need to demand better products. These things are not cheap.
Over the years I’ve gotten experience building gaming PCs and worked with a number of different cooling solutions for CPUs both air cooling and liquid cooling I’ve also tinkered with many different brands of pc case fans at different price points and noise performance levels.
What I have come to realize after working with computers is the poor quality of the lighting equipment that we have in this hobby.
Some of it is really poorly designed and this became apparent again with my recent purchase for my new tank that I just set up a couple weeks ago.
I decided to splurge and bought some new light equipment. I bought two units of the AI prime 16 HD for my IM30L. As I slowly cranked up the intensity percentages to acclimate the corals, I noticed that the fans on these little things are super loud.
They are easily pushing 60-70 dB. Maybe more. I begin to wonder what I can do to improve the noise levels. maybe doing some type of fan mod swapping out the fan for a better fan etc. I popped the little screen fan cover off and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
AI truly went for form over function on these things, sacrificing cooling performance for a Compact form factor. The heat sink is ridiculously bad. Very small surface area for the wattage with a undersized cheap fan with a cheap bearing.
I’m only running the LED at 75% power and the fans run at a constant 100%.
I’m just bummed. I’m not engineer, but I could vastly improve the cooling performance on these little things. Give it a larger heat sink with more fins, thinner fins, and a larger, higher quality fan with a better bearing.
This reminds me of when I bought a used ATI T5 fixture. Got it home and fired it up. Couldn’t believe the amount of fan noise coming off what was originally several hundred dollar german designed light. I ordered replacement fans thinking “these must just be defective.” Opened up the fan brackets and see a junk chinese fan with a rifle bearing (cheapy) that must have cost them $0.75 each. Imagine a high end several hundred dollar German light with $0.75 Chinese fans. The idea of it is offensive.
I think generally people aren’t too familiar with this tech and fans and don’t really understand just how lousy these products are. I’m debating returning the AI Primes. Even if I did a fan mod with some high quality Noctua fans, the limitations of the garbage design heat sink would still hold it back.
Even at 100% intensity, the fan should not be running at 100% rpm for the entire time. A good design would allow you to run max intensity and have the fans only hit 75% max rpm or something along those lines. Really disappointed. We need to demand better products. These things are not cheap.