Can someone help me out with this light?

[ryanoh]

I own a 36 inch Marineland Doublebright LED setup, and I have no idea who many watts it has. I know this makes me sound dumb, but let me explain first.

I got my first tank, a 55 gallon, as a family hand-me-down, and I believe the light was one left over from a salt water tank. I'm not sure. It was very bright, but only the right half of it worked, so come my birthday I got my mom to buy me a new light. I was looking for one that had decent reviews on Amazon as well as one that looked nice on top of the tank. This was only about four months into my fish keeping experience, so I really had no idea what to look for in a light. I settled on the sleek looking Marineland Doublebright because I wasn't a huge fan of the clunky, half dead Coralife light that I had.

No, like six months and many tank changes later, I'm looking at adding some more plants. I currently have a few, but I'd like to build myself up to a well aquascaped planted tank. My problem is I don't know if I should be looking for a low light or medium light or high light plants because I don't know what I've got. I've Googled every possible combination of words looking for some answers on this light, but all I can find out about it is that it has 16 one watt white LEDs and 8 'night-light' LEDs, for a total of 1,200 Lumens.

So, I can tell you I've got 30 Lumens per gallon in my tank, but that doesn't really help me out as far as know what plants I can grow. I know ideally I'd get a better light, and if I had a time machine to go back and spent the money on something else I would, but right now this is what I've got and I don't have the money to upgrade it...

 

[ryanoh]

Also, after re-reading this post, clearly its a 16 Watt light, giving me less than 0.5 wpg, but I feel like something else must be going on with this light or the plants I have to have been surviving.

 

[prsturm]

Watts don't really mean much. What matters is wavelength. If your plants use red and blue-violet light, then all that other light is simply bouncing off. If your plants use red-orange light, then all the other wavelengths simply reflect away. LEDs are made to give the proper wavelengths, more than a watt rating.

 

[ryanoh]

Its listed as a full spectrum light, so that's good. Would you say its low, medium, or high light though?

 

[brian1973]

Full spectrum is more of a marketing technique, I am not going to get into the tech side of that simply because I don't recall all of it, but many incandescent lights are sold as full spectrum when they can not truly provide a beneficial full spectrum., PRSTURM hit the nail on the head, a lot of emphasis is put into Watts per gallon when the intensity is more important, Read up on Lumens and Kelvin, this is what truly matters with lighting.. I don't know if you can still find some of the older posts on here but a couple years ago there were a lot of discussions on lighting, I haven't been to active here for a while so i don't know how many recent posts you will find going in depth into lighting.