Nicrew reef light question

TodaysTrolling · Mar 26, 2021

I have a 70 gallon, 4 ft wide. 21 inches tall. Probably about 19 inches to sand bed. Want to switch off of viparspectra, just no longer a fan of them. Was thinking of getting the nicrew reef. My question is, how many and what wattage should I get?

tbrown · Mar 26, 2021

I got this one in 30 watt for my 5 gallon all-in-one:

I like it and my corals seem to as well. I run my blues at 30% and my whites at 5%.
For that long of a tank, I'd go with probably 3 of the 50s or maybe even of the 100s for more controllability. The 100 watt say they have 24*24 coverage at 24", so you'd probably have dark edges with just two.

Jekyl · Mar 26, 2021

There will be a drop in par as compared to the black boxes. I've heard good things about the nicrew lights for the price. 2 of the 100w would be good, 3 or 4 would be better if wanting to keep sps. I run 2 kessil 360 on my 4' tank and even then 4 would be better.

tbrown · Mar 26, 2021

TodaysTrolling said:
I have a 70 gallon, 4 ft wide. 21 inches tall. Probably about 19 inches to sand bed. Want to switch off of viparspectra, just no longer a fan of them. Was thinking of getting the nicrew reef. My question is, how many and what wattage should I get?

I guess the real question is: Which Nicrew are you considering? They make strip lights, spot lights, and the one I posted above. I assumed you were looking at that style, not the strip lights, correct?

blasterman · Mar 26, 2021

The Nicrew suffers from Noopsyche syndrome. Great idea and package but lousy color channels. You have a choice of deep blue, blue, or yellow. They also don't need all the whites.

They need to combine all the blues on one channel, whites on another, and put a couple reds and warms on the last channel. If they did this they would put Radion out of business.

By putting red and green on the same channel this makes yellow and totally kills the light from pulling out purples and reds in corals. The Chinese can reverse engineer Western fighters but they can't look at the channels on a Radion or AI and connect the dots.

Getting closer though.

Spare time · Mar 26, 2021

blasterman said:
The Nicrew suffers from Noopsyche syndrome. Great idea and package but lousy color channels. You have a choice of deep blue, blue, or yellow. They also don't need all the whites.

They need to combine all the blues on one channel, whites on another, and put a couple reds and warms on the last channel. If they did this they would put Radion out of business.

By putting red and green on the same channel this makes yellow and totally kills the light from pulling out purples and reds in corals. The Chinese can reverse engineer Western fighters but they can't look at the channels on a Radion or AI and connect the dots.

Getting closer though.

I would disagree. In my opinion, having used the old and new ones (new one's have frosted lense) and the 100 and 150w over hundreds of frags) the red or green hardly do anything due to how strong the blue is. They have very few white diodes. In fact, that is what is nice about them compared to other LED's such as black boxes. There is so few red and green compared to white but especially compared to blue that the only way that you could possibly notice them washing out colors is if you ran very little blue as the blue is extremely strong relative to the white channel. A single red and 2 green per puck really shouldn't wash out colors when the light has 17 blue/violet colored LED's per puck in most scenarios.