Lighting Suggestions

[pitdogg2]

Obviously you more than likely will not need one as bright or powerful. You get a lot of lumens for very little power usage. This one cost me $100 for 60,000 lumens. The hanging 4' light is 30,000 lumens.

[pitdogg2]

[Marty]

They are sure priced right, I thought it looked like a person would have to wire a plug in on it, I don’t know much about wiring but is that the case. Thanks again I’m looking into it.

[BiotopeEnjoyer]

Thank you Tristan,
exactly the information I have been looking for and the very light you spoke of is what I was thinking I would go with but wondered about the ramping up the light in the morning and night, now I know, I was going off assuming they would because most lights do. Your tank looks incredible I really appreciate your thoughts.

Thank you for the kind words, Marty (and Al and Frank) If you do go with the Kessil 160's then definitely get the Spectral X controller. It can be awkward to learn but it's set-and-forget once you've got it down. I believe it gives you ten (I could be wrong) timepoints you can set to any time during the day with any intensity you want, with the lights ramping up or down between points fairly smoothly. Be warned, the 160's are running on very shoddy firmware that is likely a bad port of their 360 model firmware. The lights come on fairly bright, even if set to 1%, which startled my discus every morning. When I reached out to Kessil support asking why 1% is so bright, they told me the light actually operates in 5% increments, despite being adjustable by each 1%. Meaning they turn on five times brighter than you'd expect.


This is no longer an issue now thankfully as the tank was recently moved and natural light from nearby windows wakes the discus up before the Kessils turn on, meaning much calmer mornings for them. Depending on how dark your tank's room is in the mornings, this could be a big problem or no problem at all.

The Spectral X controller also offers a basic "color" value from 0-100, with no fine tuning. I believe the color number makes the light go from blue to orange, so it does have very basic color adjustment but not the full spectrum adjustment the hardware is surely capable of.

Another point you should know before purchasing is the wiring. Kessil 160's are connected via daisy chain AUX cables - the controller plugs into light A, light A has a separate cable going to light B which needs another cable going to light C and so on. With the rigid arms this is not a big problem, you can thread each cable up and down inside the arms very neatly, but you do need quite long cables for them to go down an arm, across a few feet behind the stand and back up another arm. Cables of suitable length for this are not included in the Kessil 160 purchase. Do not get ripped off buying cables from Kessil, they are basic AUX cables you can get for 1/2 the price on Amazon. I bought these 5M cables and they worked just fine:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BX48J7H5

Before I moved and got the rigid arms ($75 each of course) and longer cables, my wiring looked like this. Not the prettiest.


Overall I love the lights, love the hardware, hate the company. It's unreasonable that Kessil (a company bringing in $66 million a year in revenue according to Google) has such poorly designed, overpriced controllers and terrible software. I would still recommend the 160's as long you get them eyes-wide-open to their flaws.

[pitdogg2]

They are sure priced right, I thought it looked like a person would have to wire a plug in on it, I don’t know much about wiring but is that the case. Thanks again I’m looking into it.

Some you may, mine that is not the case. Mine came with an 8' cord. It does however have a pigtail if you would like a motion sensor hooked up. I just ran electrical tape around the ends for that and secured it to where the cable enters the housing.