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- Mar 22, 2025
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- Bothell, WA
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Disclaimer: The unit under review was given to me for free and in exchange I was asked to review it here. Despite that I will try to be as fair as I can be.
Alright to start off the review with appropriate expectations let’s quickly look at the price. The light I was sent normally retails for $120 USD so based on that I think it would be fair to consider it a budget light with premium features. Keep this in mind for the rest of the review because it’s pretty important
I didn’t take any pictures of it in the packaging, but, the packaging itself is good. Everything is held in place nicely by the foam inserts and so nothing can get scratched or otherwise damaged.
Delightfully, it even comes with both a hanging kit and a mount! Premium brands usually make you buy mounting solutions separately so you have to figure out exactly what you need ahead of time. The mount is decently adjustable and feels very solid with the screws tightened.
I set this light up on my wife’s Fiji Cube 10G AIO tank (pictured above), which has mostly TBS live rock and sand, plus some decorative macro algaes, a few crabs, a diana conch, and a pink streaked wrasse. For corals she’s got some gorilla nipples zoas and some hidden cup corals and for now that’s it. Prior to this, the tank had a small finnex freshwater light.
Setup was a breeze. I downloaded the REEFB app on the app store, turned the light on and paired it. I was very happy to find that it’s just Bluetooth, and doesn’t involve any cloud services. The app itself is decent and most activities in it are reasonable: setting up a new basic schedule from nothing is very quick, editing an existing schedule is straightforward. The only negative thing I can say about the app interface is that the live preview is inconsistent: sometimes some or all channels don’t update until you save.
When you move the light channel sliders the light spectrum graph updates appropriately as well, which is a nice touch.
One problem area for the app is scenes. This is where I experienced most problems I saw with the light not always updating the channel intensities as expected. Also, saving scenes takes kind of a long time. Lastly you can’t configure anything about the one dynamic scene, Thunderstorm, which is pretty intense for a tank this small. However, I don’t intend to use scenes anyway so it’s not really a big deal, but it is something to note
I think REEF B could also continue to improve the app in other ways:
1. Lighting program templates. Currently there is only one built-in program template which sets all the channels to a percentage, sets up the light ramp up/down times, and keeps the moonlight on all “night”. The UI is adequate for building more complex programs as well, but, it’d be nice if there was a way to templatize+export them so users can share with each other, or even have additional built-in program templates.
2. The app doesn’t seem to have any troubleshooting features. This isn’t a huge deal necessarily but it could be nice to have as it ages
3. There’s no acclimation features either to automatically ramp lighting intensity to a target percentage over a set number of days, or to make manually doing it convenient. This isn’t a killer problem per se, but, given the lack of templates makes it a deterrent against setting up a more complex lighting schedule
My one wishlist item is: a home-assistant integration would be awesome
Back to the light itself: it looks really good even on the default “flat” program. I haven’t really gotten into making a more complicated program yet mainly because the simple default is already quite good looking. The zoas are visibly the happiest they’ve ever been in this tank and we can take good pictures of stuff in there without using an orange filter. Intensity is more than adequate, as you can see from the program screenshot I’ve currently got it set to 30% and it seems to be plenty of light even with all of those different colors. I haven’t measured the PAR yet but looking at the zoas I think I wouldn’t change it much even if I did measure it, so it hasn’t felt urgent yet. When I do get around to it I’ll make sure to update this thread with the values
Here’s the zoas, day 1 with the new light (last Wednesday so 6 days ago):
And today:
hidden cup coral may not be photosynthetic, but it looks nice today:
Shading isn’t bad, either. Here’s a FTS, you can see there are definitely some shadows from the reefrax thing high on the back, but given that it’s a relatively small light it’s pretty decent. The shaded zoas behind the others were already kinda brown from the previous light but even in their current shade they seem to be recovering and are looking a bit better than they did last week
The scheduled ramping looks good too. It’s definitely stepped enough to be able to notice it stepping down/up, but the steps are still small enough that it doesn’t startle anything, so it’s good enough
Since I only run it at 30% the fan never comes on and it’s dead silent. I don’t actually yet know how loud the fan might be because of that, but for tanks with lower intensity needs like this one, the light is silent which is pretty cool
For the money, the koralLED 70W is excellent and in my opinion punches well above its weight, in many ways it’s capable of competing with lights that cost over twice as much and does it without nickel-and-diming on mounting. For reefing on a budget this light is a super deal and even without budget considerations it comes dangerously close to beating primes and reefleds in just about every possible way
Alright to start off the review with appropriate expectations let’s quickly look at the price. The light I was sent normally retails for $120 USD so based on that I think it would be fair to consider it a budget light with premium features. Keep this in mind for the rest of the review because it’s pretty important
I didn’t take any pictures of it in the packaging, but, the packaging itself is good. Everything is held in place nicely by the foam inserts and so nothing can get scratched or otherwise damaged.
Delightfully, it even comes with both a hanging kit and a mount! Premium brands usually make you buy mounting solutions separately so you have to figure out exactly what you need ahead of time. The mount is decently adjustable and feels very solid with the screws tightened.
I set this light up on my wife’s Fiji Cube 10G AIO tank (pictured above), which has mostly TBS live rock and sand, plus some decorative macro algaes, a few crabs, a diana conch, and a pink streaked wrasse. For corals she’s got some gorilla nipples zoas and some hidden cup corals and for now that’s it. Prior to this, the tank had a small finnex freshwater light.
Setup was a breeze. I downloaded the REEFB app on the app store, turned the light on and paired it. I was very happy to find that it’s just Bluetooth, and doesn’t involve any cloud services. The app itself is decent and most activities in it are reasonable: setting up a new basic schedule from nothing is very quick, editing an existing schedule is straightforward. The only negative thing I can say about the app interface is that the live preview is inconsistent: sometimes some or all channels don’t update until you save.
When you move the light channel sliders the light spectrum graph updates appropriately as well, which is a nice touch.
One problem area for the app is scenes. This is where I experienced most problems I saw with the light not always updating the channel intensities as expected. Also, saving scenes takes kind of a long time. Lastly you can’t configure anything about the one dynamic scene, Thunderstorm, which is pretty intense for a tank this small. However, I don’t intend to use scenes anyway so it’s not really a big deal, but it is something to note
I think REEF B could also continue to improve the app in other ways:
1. Lighting program templates. Currently there is only one built-in program template which sets all the channels to a percentage, sets up the light ramp up/down times, and keeps the moonlight on all “night”. The UI is adequate for building more complex programs as well, but, it’d be nice if there was a way to templatize+export them so users can share with each other, or even have additional built-in program templates.
2. The app doesn’t seem to have any troubleshooting features. This isn’t a huge deal necessarily but it could be nice to have as it ages
3. There’s no acclimation features either to automatically ramp lighting intensity to a target percentage over a set number of days, or to make manually doing it convenient. This isn’t a killer problem per se, but, given the lack of templates makes it a deterrent against setting up a more complex lighting schedule
My one wishlist item is: a home-assistant integration would be awesome
Back to the light itself: it looks really good even on the default “flat” program. I haven’t really gotten into making a more complicated program yet mainly because the simple default is already quite good looking. The zoas are visibly the happiest they’ve ever been in this tank and we can take good pictures of stuff in there without using an orange filter. Intensity is more than adequate, as you can see from the program screenshot I’ve currently got it set to 30% and it seems to be plenty of light even with all of those different colors. I haven’t measured the PAR yet but looking at the zoas I think I wouldn’t change it much even if I did measure it, so it hasn’t felt urgent yet. When I do get around to it I’ll make sure to update this thread with the values
Here’s the zoas, day 1 with the new light (last Wednesday so 6 days ago):
And today:
hidden cup coral may not be photosynthetic, but it looks nice today:
Shading isn’t bad, either. Here’s a FTS, you can see there are definitely some shadows from the reefrax thing high on the back, but given that it’s a relatively small light it’s pretty decent. The shaded zoas behind the others were already kinda brown from the previous light but even in their current shade they seem to be recovering and are looking a bit better than they did last week
The scheduled ramping looks good too. It’s definitely stepped enough to be able to notice it stepping down/up, but the steps are still small enough that it doesn’t startle anything, so it’s good enough
Since I only run it at 30% the fan never comes on and it’s dead silent. I don’t actually yet know how loud the fan might be because of that, but for tanks with lower intensity needs like this one, the light is silent which is pretty cool
For the money, the koralLED 70W is excellent and in my opinion punches well above its weight, in many ways it’s capable of competing with lights that cost over twice as much and does it without nickel-and-diming on mounting. For reefing on a budget this light is a super deal and even without budget considerations it comes dangerously close to beating primes and reefleds in just about every possible way
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