The Coralife LED Aqualight that was debuted at MACNA 2014 in Denver got its first big reveal to the consumer world in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Coralife’s first effort at making an LED aquarium light was ill-fated for trying to compete in the top-end of the LED lighting market with companies that specialize in making full-featured LED reef lights.
We presume that Coralife learned a lot about making and designing an LED light that first go around and their newest LED Aqualight is decidedly more in line with the market that Coralife and related products try to market to. The new Coralife LED light is a more basic strip light that uses fairly standard MR16 LED lamps that Coralife has made in five colors that can be mixed and matched within a single fixture.
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way, the Coralife LED Aqualight is not the next killer reef light – it is a no-nonsense basic LED lighting solution for an aquarist looking simply to illuminate their marine or freshwater aquarium, while using less energy and replacing the lighting component much less frequently. We think that Coralife knows this, and to this end they’ve really embraced the position of this light in the marketplace.
Dimming, timing, color control and your precious lightning features are all omitted from the Coralife LED Aqualight in lieu of a basic striplight with itty bitty moonlights, and a DC power supply to run a number of their TriLamp LED spots. What we like about Coralife’s new approach to an LED aquarium striplight is that it isn’t trying to be something it’s not – we might use this kind of light over our fish-only aquarium, but we’d be especially happy to recommend this light to our parents and relatives who are only casual aquarium fanciers.
Sure the narrow beam lenses on the LEDs create spotlights in the tank, and the colors blend like oil and water, that is to say not very well, but grandma Deb and uncle Joe will never know the difference. Furthermore, we applaud Coralife’s packaging and retails tore stands because they are catering to resellers and LFS as much as they are to the end user.
Most of all, the bare bones design of this kind of LED light offering means that there is so little that can go wrong. Putting little LED spotlights that are designed to be passively cooled into a fixture which is actively cooled also means that even if other subcomponents occasionally fail, the LEDs in the Aqualight TriLamp spotlights should last well into the 2020’s.
Coralife’s new and improved LED Aqualight is shipping to dealers nationwide and while pricing may vary, the fixtures will carry an MSRP of around $249 for 24″ fixtures up to $399 for 48″ fixtures, all of which will be partially loaded with LED trilamps with room for more. [Coralife]
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