There’s such a flood of cheap Chinese LED lights for the marine aquarium available on the market these days, we find it hard to write about any one of them. But the new Ocean Revive Arctic LED is so cheap it makes us wonder how low can they go?
At $175 for 120 watts (before shipping) the new Arctic LED from Ocean Revive is getting dangerously close to $1 per watt of LED power. The $199 version of the Ocean Revive’s Arctic LED comes with a built in LCD timer and dimming functions, that’s still less than $2 per watt of LED power.
Sure you won’t get all kinds of bells and whistles, or much customer service for that matter, but at that price you can afford to experiment and add a timer of your own, or DIY the fixture into more functionality. The Arctic LED also only give you only two channels of color control, with what we reckon is average quality LEDs with moderate brightness and the color blending leaves a lot to be desired but the corals won’t care nearly as much as the aquarist.
YouTube user CichPhreak has already taken the plunge and shared a review of the Ocean Revive Arctic LED and the corals look pretty good, despite the mediocre light spread across the reef tank, with some hot spotting of light intensity here and there. The top tier LED manufacturers are doing really great things with making their fixtures upgradeable but ‘cheap Chinese LEDs’ getting better all the time, they’re going to have to work harder to convince the spendthrifts that functionality and longevity are worth the investment. [Ocean Revive]
