Casco Europe showed off its new programmable LED lighting system at the Interzoo 2008 trade show in Germany.
The Aqua FX lighting bars use a light strip containing RGB (red, green, blue) hi-power LEDs and white LEDs, which can be controlled by the user to provide exactly the colour they require.
The units comes with an infra-red remote control containing a number of pre-sets that the user can select, including white, red, green, orange, yellow and purple.
There are also pre-set colour sequences for sunset colours (reds and oranges), ocean colours (blues and greens), full-spectrum rainbow colours and full-spectrum pseudo-random. The user can also fine tune their selection and save their colour selection as a favourite.
Aqua FX also features a colour change function which allows the lights to be adjusted from one colour to another, which could be of use in acclimating new fish to the system, says Casco.
Matthew Bubear of Casco Europe, told Practical Fishkeeping: Aqua FX is a programmable LED system. It has a possibility of 16 million colours " which I think is enough for most people.
You can recreate sunrise and sunset; you can have red, blue, you can have solid colours. You can have a bright white colour. The red can be used, for example, for acclimation when you're putting fish away. The blue can be used to highlight actinic properties in corals, or providing a moonlight effect.
Energy consumption is very low, and possibilities for reducing your carbon footprint are obviously very popular at the moment.
Casco claims that the Aqua FX should offer a long lifespan of around 10 years, which both reduces replacement costs and the environmental aspect of replacing fluorescent tubes.
Casco said: Additionally, as the unit is 'tunable' it only uses the required amount of electrical power. For example with the 1m strips shown at Interzoo the power varies from 36W (100% full on white) to 3W (dimmed blue night mode).
The visual 'shimmer' effect of LED lighting is an added bonus and provides a lighting effect much closer to that of metal halide than a fluorescent tube.
The Aqua FX model shown at Interzoo was a preview unit for the technology on Casco's shop systems, which is due out in September 2008 and is expected to retail for around 100, including the remote control.
Consumer versions of the Aqua FX are due to follow later, and no price, size or distributor information was available.