Gavita’s fan cooled Plasma light is not the kind of light you’d want to hand over an open top reef tank, nor is it adequately protected for saltwater exposure but its price is much more in the affordable range. The Gavita Pro 300 LEP is one of the most polished electrodeless halide assemblies we’ve seen so far that is using Luxim’s LIFI Plasma technology. Unfortunately, that huge magnetron producing the microwaves gets extremely hot and so far all the plasma light designs we’ve seen are loaded up with tons of aluminum heatsink to passively cool the unit. All that extra metal makes most Plasma lights very bulky and extremely heavy, and all that heft and weight adds up in the total cost of plasma lights pushing them well over a thousand dollars for the base price. If solid state specs and some noise is not a concern or if you really want to pump out that heat, the fan cooled plasma light from Gavita is smaller, lighter and much cheaper.
We first spotted the fan-cooled Gavita PRO 300 LEP at a recent indoor gardening expo and although at first glance it looks just like any other tubular HID light fixture, the small reflector and tiny emitter is all Plasma. Since this Plasma light from Gavita is actively cooled it can do away with all that extra aluminum and the components can be spaced much closer together for a smaller overall unit. The base price of the standard solid state Gavita Pro 300 LEP is $1400 or more with some additional features but the fan cooled Gavita 300 LEP is 50% cheaper and expected to retail closer to $900. So basically for the price of two solid state Gavita Pro plasma lights you could get three of the fan cooled version and probably save some money on the significantly reduced hanging hardware. Gavita has stated that they will be coming out with an aquarium version of the Gavita PRO 300 LEP in the future but seeing as the fan cooled horticltural version isn’t even out yet, it could be quite a long time before we see a fan-cooled aquarium version of the Gavita plasma light if at all.
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