Sanrise is a newcomer to the aquarium lighting scene but their flagship Aqua Sanrise fixture is getting a lot of attention lately. It doesn’t hurt that this fixture looks really great on its own, with both onboard and wireless control capabilities.
The real driver behind the Aqua Sanrise’s early success was seeing it over all of the Aquarama 2015 reef aquascaping competition aquariums. This is where we had the chance to see the new light in action, lighting up a huge diversity of corals in the most beautiful way, with exceptional depth penetration and impeccable color blending all throughout the aquarium.
If the Sanrise’s list of features stopped there it would already be a great choice for reef aquarium lighting but the Aqua LED has a few more tricks hiding inside its classy enclosure. The Aqua Sanrise has replaceable LED lens clusters and individually replaceable, swappable LEDs.
The Aqua Sanrise has lens clusters that are convex in shape, in both 120 and 90 degree beam angles. So you can go without them, or you can use the convex lenses in either beam of your choosing to custom taylor the light.
Also, the Aqua Sanrise has LEDs that already come in four colors, but each and every single one is user-replaceable. So you can either configure the lighting spread and distribution the way you want with the stock diodes, or you can mix and match the white, blue, violet and red LEDs to suit your taste, and the needs of your corals. Additional diodes are available in five watt white or royal blue, and three watt white, blue, royal blue, red, green, violet, purple – the 5w diodes can be placed anywhere on the board but users need to take care not to place 3w on 5w positions of the LED board.
It’s natural in the North American to be skeptical of newcomers to the lighting market since we already have such a wide range of great domestic manufacturers to choose from. However, seeing is believing and what we saw in terms of color and intensity at Aquarama is nothing to scoff at.
Aqua Sanrise will be at MACNA in Washington D.C. where the rest of the country will have a chance to see what this light is all about. Hopefully Sanrise can bring their various high end and entry-level Nano Wave LED to market in the U.S. and with plenty of diodes in a rainbow of colors so we can get back to the good old days of experimenting with lighting color over our reef tanks.
