The Apollo Reef LED SolarBlast Sunburst 4000 is a relatively new manually dimmable LED fixture looks a lot like other black box LED fixtures on the market. But as with other lighting manufacturers we’ve seen, the proof is behind the scenes in the LEDs and circuitry the manufacturer has chosen to set it apart. The Apollo Reef LED series of lights are all built off the same box as their previous fixtures but are using Bridgelux LEDs and other customizations under the hood to achieve a different kind of lighting and color.
First off, if you have heard of the company before, the SolarBlast Sunburst 4000 replaces the standard fixture that was non-dimmable adding manual control knobs on the light to adjust the blue and white channels. The Sunburst 4000 uses a unique blend of royal blue and 420nm actinic purple LEDs on the ‘blue’ channel and 4000K white with four 660nm red LEDs on the ‘white’ channel.
Adding this red pop and lower temperature white LEDs is a move different from other marine LEDs looking to get the white channel as close to 12,000 to 14,000K as possible and saturating the output skewed more towards the blue spectrum instead a rounded, balanced approach. The company notes they went down this path after customer feedback and should add more color rendition in the yellow, orange and red hues in your tank.
As we mentioned before, the Sunburst is based off of Bridelux LEDs with 57 total LEDs in the system — 55 to light your tank during the daylight cycle and two for moonlights. The 3W LEDs are driven at 2W to extend the service life of the diode and are cooled with a hearty heatsink and fans. We aren’t sure what kind of fans are installed but are hoping they are higher quality, silent running fans to cutdown on the noise as much as possible.
The power is supplied through three separate power cords for each channel (white, blue and moonlights) and it comes with a stainless steel cable hanging system. For all you PAR and coverage geeks, check out the company’s graphs on the website.
The Apollo Reef LED SolarBlast Sunburst 4000 runs at $299 and is available now. For more information about the company and the light, check out the YouTube video below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7vFzgXYaUQ[/youtube]
