Last week we visited Aqua Illumination LED light manufacturing plant in Ames Iowa where we got to spend a lot of time getting to know and understand the groundbreaking new Hydra 26 & Hydra 52 “HyperDrive” LEDs. In addition to taking a trip down memory lane of Aqua Illumination’s many generation of LED lights, we took some time to scope out the display reef tank and the sweet array of Prime LEDs it is rocking.
It’s clear that Aqua Illumination knows how to use the Prime LEDs that they designed and build. One thing which we always particularly loved about the AI Prime is the ball joint included in the mounting arm and in the hanging kit, allowing the Prime to function very much like a spotlight.
The AI Prime may be small, but its 13-LED cluster is anything but nano amounts of power. To this end Aqua Illumination has enlisted ten of their powerful pads of controllable light into an incredibly well engineered array of controllable and adjustable light rays.
The frame of the 10-Prime LED array is constructed of 80/20 aluminum material which is perfect for building strong and lightweight frames for anything from tank stands to lighting stands. The 80/20’s inherent extrusion design makes it an especially flexible building block which also plays nice with the adjustable hanging kit from Aqua Illumination.
One of the most overlooked aspects to building and designing an LED aquarium light is the variety of mounting and hanging options that will be made available so that you can use the thing in a practical way over your tank. In this regard, Aqua Illumination has always excelled at offering many different hanging and mounting options.
The 10-Prime LED array might be a simple exercise in thinking outside the design box for various ways that Aqua Illumination lights can be used and mounted over a reef tank. But we know that AI Is working on some novel new ways to support their lights, especially for the AI Prime and Hydra 26 which are small enough to play nice with industrial goosenecks.
Seeing this versatile assembly of AI Prime LEDs installed this way at the source gives us hope that there’s some creative juices flowing at Aqua Illumination and we fully expect to see this creativity demonstrated in future mounting options from AI in the future.
