We have reviewed the Best LED light for reef tank. If you are in a hurry, the table below gives a quick snapshot of the top ones.
Table of Contents
Over the past few years, LED lights have become very popular among reef tank owners. LEDs are considered to be the best option for reef tanks as they are highly customizable.
LED lighting has user-friendly timers, ramp up and ramp down features, and spectrum adjustability. You can mount lightweight LED lights on the rim of the aquariums with ease.
You can set up the proper amount of lighting inside your reef tank that the reef needed to grow. LED lights are lightweight and also give your aquarium a colorful look. However, the main benefit of LED lights is power saving.
Why LED Lighting for Reef Tanks?
To understand LED lighting’s popularity, we should know a bit of history on lighting systems in reef tanks.
VHOs or T5s used to be the way to go till a few years back. They had manual timers. While they were great for lighting spread and no shadow, the light intensity (PAR) was not too great.
Metal halides were introduced to solve light intensity, and people started using hybrid systems with both halide and T5.
So now we had even spread, with the right intensity. But the power consumption was a bomb. On top of that, the lighting became so hot that people needed chillers to cool down the tank.
LED’s LED’s were the ultimate solution to all of these problems:
- They are energy efficient and have unique drivers, which means you can customize them.
- Aquarium LED fixtures can also have electronic timers that turn the lights on and off as per your requirement. They can be dimmed. They can even be ramped up and ramped down to give the effect of morning and evening/night.
- Plus, they are a lot safer to use than T5 or halides. T5’s have metal filaments, and halides have gas, which can both be very dangerous. Modern LED fixtures are even waterproof.
- Lastly, LED lights are a lot more compact, so if you are the owner of a nano reef or a small tank, there is no other way to go.
The latest LED lights are even running via your smartphone through apps and voice assistants like Alexa or Siri!
Our Top Choice Current USA Orbit LED Light
The Current USA Orbit Marine LED Light, 24"-36" | With LOOP IR Controller for Wireless Lighting & Wave Pump Control (4101) is our top choice for “best LED light for reef tank” because:
- Marine LED lights brighten up your aquarium with vivid colors.
- Loop provides both light and pumps control.
- Wide-angle dispersion lenses evenly spread light to your entire tank.
- An adjustable tank mount bracket creates a sleeker look.
- A built-in lighting program design 24 hours lighting cycle.
- Extendable brackets allow it to fit most aquariums.
- Adjustable color spectrums and six on-demand weather effects.
- From start-up to slow-down, it mimics the effect of a slow sunrise.
Best LED Light For Reef Tank
#1 Current USA Orbit LED Light
Current USA Orbit LED Light is our top choice for the best-LED light for a reef tank. The new Orbit LED light brightens your reef aquarium with vivid and bright colors. With its wireless loop control and other advanced features, the LED light performs effortlessly.
Features and Benefits
- Brightened Colors: This LED light ensures to lighten up your aquarium with vivid and bright colors. It gives a far broader color spectrum and makes your corals and fishes look more spectacular. Its loop provides both light and pump control and offers your aquarium a whole new experience. Its 24 hrs light and pump power let you program daily light schedules and create waves and control the water flow.
- Multiple Modes: the LED light comes in various modes to create more bright colors. There is a mode that dims to create a cloud effect and a storm mode that will blow you away with the lightning strikes, and an innovative evening mode that includes lunar and dusk. So these modes add to the beauty and charm of your aquarium.
- Realistic Effects: These LED lights have built-in lighting programs that create a 24 hrs natural lightening cycle. This light gradually mimics a slow sunrise, dimming sunset, and moonlight effect that gives a more realistic effect to the aquarium.
- Spectrum: the Orbit marine is designed to produce a limitless number of cold ranges. Its wide-angle dispersion lenses evenly spread light over the entire tank and ensure proper color blending. It has control flow mode, a flow rate that lets you adjust the settings as per your choice.
Why should you buy it?
The LED light offers a broad color spectrum and gives glorious colors to your aquarium. It has multiple modes that create bright modes to provide unique effects, and also it adds to the beauty and charm of your aquarium.
You might like to read: Best Led Aquarium Lights For Plants
#2 BeamsWork DA FSPEC LED Aquarium Light
This aquarium light is our second choice for the best-LED light for a reef tank. The LED fixture provides a high-quality, energy-efficient light fixture that makes it better than normal fluorescent light. This sleek and contemporary light fixture can give your aquarium a charming look and makes your fishes look more charming.
Features and Benefits
- Splendid Colors: The FSPEC LED aquarium light can give your aquarium bright and magnificent colors and make it look more attractive and beautiful. The LED light for the reef tank offers a powerful and great spectrum and gives bright colors. This LED fixture is a high-quality and energy-efficient light fixture that makes it better and efficient than a typical single tube fluorescent tube.
- Spectrum: The LED aquarium light fixture is pre-installed with 10000K, Actinic 460nm, red 620nm, and green 520 nm spectrum LED’sLED’s that offer bright and splendid colors and a fantastic brightness to your aquarium. The lights are extremely powerful and give a magnificent spectrum to your aquarium.
- Mode: the light has in-built ways that give amazing effects. This LED light’s two-mode operations allow full power during the day, and moonlight mode during the night provides a full night view and offers a splendid look to the aquarium.
- Ideal: It has extendable brackets that allow it to be used with various size aquariums. Each of the fixtures is pre-wired to use with an optional timer module and is suitable for freshwater, plants, and cichlid.
Why should you buy it?
One LED light suitable for freshwater and plants as the LED light gives bright and splendid colors. It is a high-quality and energy-efficient light fixture that makes it better and efficient than a typical single tube fluorescent tube. It is useful to offer a broad spectrum and make your aquarium look more attractive.
#3 NICREW Saltwater Aquarium Light
The LED aquarium light creates a realistic underwater home aquarium environment and an ultimate lightning effect day or night. The LED light is ideal for coral tanks and marine fishes.
Features and Benefits
- Bright LED: It is composed of cool white, 445nm blue, 460 nm blue, and RGB LED to create bright and splendid colors. The bright daylight and nightlight create an ideal environment for your fishes and corals. The higher ratio of blue spectrum LED with full spectrum creates the perfect color combinations.
- Adjustable Brackets: The adjustable brackets fit the aquarium tank from 18-24 inches, and you can easily mount them on both framed and frameless aquariums with extendable mounts. Its multiple sizes give convenience to use it for all sorts of aquariums.
- Dual-channel Timer: It features a dual-channel timer that can control the white and blue lightning channels separately. Moreover, it also features a 24 hours LED aquarium lighting control with two modes: 15 minutes sunrise and sunset or instant on/off so that you can use it for your aquarium to add more grace and charm to it.
- Ideal: The One Classic LED is designed to support saltwater fish, live rock, soft coral, and LPS corals. For low-light SPS corals, you can use two lights. Moreover, you can add a glass or acrylic canopy to extend its life and prevent moisture from affecting it.
Why should you buy it?
If you are searching for an LED light for soft corals and LPS corals, this one will be suitable for you. It is composed of different lights and modes that provide a broad spectrum and produce glorious colors to make your aquarium look more splendid and beautiful.
You might like to read: Best Aquarium Lighting For Fish Color
#4 Phlizon 165W Full Spectrum LED Light
The full-spectrum LED light gives unique and beautiful colors and has different lights to match to make your aquarium look healthy and beautiful correctly. The scientific spectrum meets all the light requirements that are ideal for the growth of fishes and corals.
Features and Benefits
- Full-spectrum: the full spectrum LED light contains UV blue, purple-red, white, and green light. Its blue UV light produces vitamin D3 that promotes corals, and red lights are ideal for fishes’ healthy growth. The green LED is suitable for plants, seawater, and freshwater. The scientific full-spectrum design is perfect for the development of fish, corals, and aquatic grasses.
- Double Dimmer Model: the two dual dimmer model set lights to acclimate fish and plants to the new light. The dimmer function can fit both day and night and works for two separate channels whose brightness can be adjusted separately. Its unique design lets the light directly reach fish and plants and promote their growth.
- Low Noise Cooling Fan: The fans can be rotated to let the heat dissipation of the lamp and prolong its service life. It also creates low noise that makes it suitable for your fishes. Moreover, the light can be linked to the power code for better connectivity.
Why should you buy it?
This aquarium gives full spectrum LED light that meets all the light requirements that are ideal for the growth of fishes and corals and creates a healthy environment for them to grow.
#5 MingDak Submersible LED Aquarium Light
The upgraded submersible LED light is a great underwater light with three lighting modes, 6/1012H timing periods, 10 level brightness choices that enhances fish colors and provides an ultimate lighting effect in day and night.
Features and Benefits
- Modes: It has three lighting modes: white, blue, white, and blue, which creates a beautiful aquascape and brings out the glorious colors. Moreover, there are brightness options from 10-100% that let you increase the brightness and adjust the brightness color beads.
- Built-in Timer: the fish tank light has a built-in timer and a three-timing duration that will come on and off at the same time and lights up for 6 hours, 10 hours, and 12 hours. Moreover, you don’t need to buy an extra timer. 18 super-bright LEDs in the fish tank light let you adjust the brightness with the built-in dimmer for both white and blue light.
- Ideal: the three-layered waterproof design can be fully submerged. Moreover, it has upgraded suction cups that are easy to install and can be pressed firmly onto the tank wall. Its circulation button gives a better way to connect with the modes of your choice.
- Suitable for Plants: The LED lights are also the right choice for plants as it disperses in all directions to give better lighting for plants’ growth. The ultra-bright light enables plants and fishes to grow correctly. It changes the color in a way to stand out.
Why should you buy it?
The LED aquarium submersible light is suitable for the growth of plants and fishes. It features three lighting modes that produce splendid colors and enables them to disperse the light in all directions, ideal for developing plants, fishes, and corals.
You might like to read: Best Aquarium Air Pump For Multiple Tanks
Buyer’sBuyer’s Guide: Best LED Lights For Reef Tank
If you are thinking about buying LED lights for your reef tank, you need to consider a few things before buying that.
Power Consumption
It is a known fact that LED light utilizes less power, but you need to consider the LED light’s power consumption before buying one. It would be best if you are looking for a LED light that consumes fewer electricity units and provides the best performance. Look for one that will help you to remain in the monthly electricity budget.
Easy Installation
Not all LED lights are customer convenient. Installation of LED light inside the reef tank is not an easy task. You need to make sure that you can assemble the parts of the morning all by yourself. Make sure that you are buying one that needs to be mounted, and after that, you need to switch it on.
Easy Control
The LED lights available in the market have programming options that control the light intensity and color. Some of them can be controlled with the help of a remote, and others can be held using mobile apps. You can create the natural ambiance inside the aquarium artificially with the help of these LED lights. Go for the one that has most of these features.
Frequently asked questions: Best LED Lights For Reef Tank.
Q1. What is the best-LED light for a reef tank?
Ans. There are numerous LED lights available in the market. Some of the best-Led lights are – EcoTech Radion G5, Ocean Revive 247-B, and Viparspectra LEDs.
Q2. How LED lights help in coral growth?
Ans. LED lights to stimulate the coral growth as LED lights are capable of mimicking the natural ambiances like sunrise, sunset, etcetera. By doing so, it creates the ideal habitat for coral growth inside the reef tank.
Q3. How many hours of LED light does a reef tank need?
Most people put their tank lights on for 10-12 hours during the day. People do a dusk/dawn schedule. Blue or actinic lights can be turned on for a couple of hours before daylight bulbs, and then for a couple of hours afterward as well.
Q4. How Much LED Light is Required For A Reef Tank
PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) is the measure of LED lighting strength. How many PAR you need depends on the type of corals that you have. For soft coral, 50 to 100 PAR is enough. For LPS, you need at least 50 to 150 PAR. For SPS, between 250 to 350 PAR of LED lighting is required if you want your corals to thrive.
Conclusion
Once you decide to go for the LED lights for your reef tank, then you can choose from a wide variety of lighting patterns. You can also choose from a vast range of colors.
Your main goal should be to find a light that creates a great blend of colors inside the reef tank and leaves no visual hotspots for you. The light you are going to choose should have an aesthetic appeal.
To do that, you need to consider the framework of your reef tank. Let us hope that this article can help you in finding the Best LED Light For Reef Tank.
In our opinion, the Current USA Orbit Marine LED Light, 24"-36" | With LOOP IR Controller for Wireless Lighting & Wave Pump Control (4101) is the best choice among the various options that we have considered because it brightens up your aquarium with vivid colors and can be fit into all types of aquariums.
The Beamswork DA FSPEC LED Aquarium Light Pent Freshwater 0.50W (90cm - 36") is our next best choice because it offers splendid colors for your aquarium.
If you are looking for a value for money option, you can also consider the MingDak Submersible LED Aquarium Light,Fish Tank Light with Timer Auto On/Off, White & Blue LED Light bar Stick for Fish Tank, 3 Light Modes Dimmable,4W,7.5 Inch, which offers excellent value and features at a very reasonable price point.
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