Radion/ LED Height AWL ?

[ADAM]

What increase would be expected in power (PAR, LUX, etc) if someone was to lower their lighting closer to the water level? Is too close possible as far as light penetration?

Does 60% +/- closer equal 60% stronger?

Reason for asking, I am pondering lowering my lighting and the way the brackets are mounted I could drop them fairly easily from the hole at the top of the wall bracket to the hole where the bottom is screwed into the wall. This would be easier than marking new holes and leave only one set of unused holes in the sheetrock to cover.

The lights are 14" AWL now and dropping the mounts to the lower holes will leave the lights at only 6" AWL.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Questions:
1) at the current height do the lights cover more than just the bottom of the tank? That is, is there much light being 'spilled' outside the tank?
2) if you lower the fixture(s), will you still cover at the bottom of the tank?
3) how deep is the water in your tank?

Lowering the fixture will not increase 'penetration' into the water that much. Light travels through the air easily compared to how well (or poorly) it travels through water. However, as the light spreads out is does gets less dense in terms of photons per square inch. So that will mean higher PAR but not because it is 'penetrating' better but because the light photons are more densely packed do to less spread.

The idea is to set your fixture so the light just covers the bottom of the tank in all four directions. Then adjust the intensity by adjusting the power.

 

[oreo54]

The idea is to set your fixture so the light just covers the bottom of the tank in all four directions. Then adjust the intensity by adjusting the power.

well that is a philosophic point.. ;)
Not wrong, just one point..

The other school suggests getting full coverage (w/ little spill outside) at the surface esp. w/ LED's.
That gives overall lighting to the tank as opposed to dead spots by concentrating coverage on the bottom..

Obviously each is "goal dependent" so no right or wrong..

W/ lensed LED's once the surface is covered most light will be trained in by reflection refraction of the glass/water interfaces..

Certainty seems more common to do it your way..but of course then many add "diffuse" light like t5's..


as to the o/p hard to tell. It could follow the 1/2 the distance 4x the "PAR" at the targeted area (inverse square rule and generally is weakly applied in this application , gets more linear i.e 1/2 the distance 2x the PAR) or not..
Gets complicated..

keeping my "philosophy" in mind you will need to determine if the loss of light (area wise) in the upper tank is worth the increase in light at the bottom..

What lights? What beam angle? ect..ect...