Radion Xr30 Pro G5

[Jason Bell]

We have a right to be angry with our own government as well.

 

[Matt1997]

Planned obsolescence. Products are designed to fail, usually right after warranty. No company would admit that though. Radions have been good to me. Can’t speak about the G5’s but I’ve had g4 pros and older for a lot of years

 

[Salty Cracker]

We have a right to be angry with our own government as well.

lol don't get me started.

We've put in for a visa to get out of Canada. I see severely bad things coming, hopefully I'm wrong, but man the visa process is brutal and expensive. It's easier to paint yourself non white and cross into Quebec and be an instant Canadian voter, than it is to become an American (much less to get the right to vote), THEY are doing it right...). But Let's focus on fishtanks, fish have no politics...

 

[Jason Bell]

Tell that to my Regal and the backbencher tang gang.

 

[Salty Cracker]

Tell that to my Regal and the backbencher tang gang.

lol

 

[Salty Cracker]

Well no thanks to canada post(!) the radion showed up.

Documentation is just a pamphlet basically, I read through it in about 2 minutes, and basically just started mashing buttons on my phone. At least it has "some" settings you can do from the front panel....
Can't get the PC interface to run, it just crashes, gives errors, and is sort of what neptune systems were like when they started.

Light seems fine though, and I sort of dissected the DIY panel that had been running for ~10 years and it's funny to see that some of the plastic lenses had actually scorched and melted. Not a lot, but probably enough to block a whole lot of light. I figure the 2 remaining panels are in a similar state, so I have to think about either replacing all the LEDs and lenses in those, or buying a couple of 15's for each side. I'll probably price everything out today and look into it. I will say that I don't see an easy way to service this radion fixture, so I guess it is yet another expensive throwaway... at least with the DIY I can keep the housing and the drivers, and just replace bulbs...

Light seems fine, although I'm glad I ordered the "blue" and not the pro...the blue is quite a bit whiter than my current setup, even with tweaking. The green lights in there I would likely replace with royal blues if that was possible. We'll see if it bleaches out any sps, although I kind of doubt it since I had a pile of UVs in my setup. Time will tell

 

[Luke.]

Nothing more that ticks me off is not being able to work on things .. it really really blows , you can fix TVs still these days but these expensive lights you can’t kessil blows for that it’s to bad radion seems to be that way aswell ..I actually bought older ai hydras , reason being I can replace stuff on it when they go . And have 2 t5 bulbs for a little punch / makes me not worry about if my lights are good enough haha .

 

[Salty Cracker]

Nothing more that ticks me off is not being able to work on things .. it really really blows , you can fix TVs still these days but these expensive lights you can’t kessil blows for that it’s to bad radion seems to be that way aswell ..I actually bought older ai hydras , reason being I can replace stuff on it when they go . And have 2 t5 bulbs for a little punch / makes me not worry about if my lights are good enough haha .

Same here, I have 2 T5s, a 5' actinic strip and 2 more DIY fixtures in there, so lots of extra. Part of the appeal of these kinds of fixtures is the reduction in the wall of drivers I have for the lights, but the drivers are good because anything is fixable, if a driver goes it only takes 13 lights with it, so the rest of the tank is untouched, but I have to think these $$$ fixtures have better light spectrum and par than I do with DIY (although I have my suspicions that the LEDs in these aren't as good as CREE bulbs, I think a lot of them use luxeon/generic lights, so who knows. Time will tell I suppose.

 

[Luke.]

I mean they will grow coral no doubt about it but yeah anything you can work on is better even if it fails more and aslong as you don’t care about taking the time to fix it , is always better and then understanding more about that item , I’m sure it’ll kick ass !

 

[TORX]

The reason the PC is not working is because it doesn't work with G5 Radions. The only control interface is on a compatible mobile phone or tablet. Good ol EcosmartLive is a thing of the past for Ecotech going forward.

I am loving my G5Blue over my nano.

Sent from my SM-G988W using Tapatalk

 

[Salty Cracker]

So so far I've had a couple of issues with the app and connections, and the programming isn't the easiest thing to figure out (and seriously WTF is up with the disco light option, who would want that).

Sps seems to be reacting like they did when I first installed my LEDs, ie bleaching but colour improvement. Growth has picked up, so obviously it's working well. So now I have the option of either replacing all of the LEDs in the remaining two fixtures, or ordering a couple of X15s to cover the sides. I'd go with 3 X30s but the $$$ starts to get out of hand pretty quick. I'm thinking that ultimately I'll end up with 3 radions, and then use a couple of the existing fixtures as fill/frag light, or something like that. The benefit to using the radions is the reduction in drivers that are mounted beside the tank (currently there's like 10 or so), but the downside is that these lights will obviously deteriorate too, and it's not just replacing some bulbs, it's replacing a $1000+ fixture. So I'm going to have to do some planning here. Overall though, they do seem to work.

 

[Salty Cracker]

I just couldn't justify the price of 2 more radion fixtures, so I ordered a complete set of replacement bulbs for my DIY fixtures. 100 bulbs and lenses still cost less than 1 small fixture...

I also see they have improved the tech on the UV bulbs, the light spectrum is even lower now, which is great.
I also selected the solderless bulbs, it's a pain having to re-solder the whole fixture when one bulb goes, this way it's a very quick fix.

 

[Salty Cracker]

Ordered the led's from rapid led yesterday afternoon, and they are already on a truck coming from mississauga, aexpected today. That's pretty cool.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm liking the radions, and very likely I'll keep one in that center position on the tank (unless it craps out just after the warranty is up, then I'll be done with them)

 

[TORX]

A definitely big negative is their price for sure. Even more so on a larger tank where multiple are needed. You can drop 2-3k or more easy on Radions. I am loving my G5 XR15 but I do miss my old DIY. RapidLED was great to work with. Their solderless LEDs are awesome, even more so if you have the supplies and ability to make custom length wires. You can even go as far as drilling the heatsink to mount the LED with screws and a little heatsink paste instead of the heatsink adhesive. No chance in the falling off and even easier yet to switch any out whether you just want a different spectrum or it burns out.

Sent from my SM-G988W using Tapatalk

 

[Salty Cracker]

A definitely big negative is their price for sure. Even more so on a larger tank where multiple are needed. You can drop 2-3k or more easy on Radions. I am loving my G5 XR15 but I do miss my old DIY. RapidLED was great to work with. Their solderless LEDs are awesome, even more so if you have the supplies and ability to make custom length wires. You can even go as far as drilling the heatsink to mount the LED with screws and a little heatsink paste instead of the heatsink adhesive. No chance in the falling off and even easier yet to switch any out whether you just want a different spectrum or it burns out.
Sent from my SM-G988W using Tapatalk

I got the heatsinks that have spots for 36 LEDs that are pre-drilled

I did one fixture with the solderless before, but I found that the sockets de-laminated fairly easily, so I'm hoping they've improved on the design in 5 years. Also, I have about 20 drivers mounted to the tank, dimmable, non dimmable, etc. I had incredible luck with led when I first did the install, so as long as the output levels on those drivers are still good I'm going to be set once the new bulbs arrive. I'll also have enough existing bulbs to do a backup fixture. It will be interesting to see how long the radions actually last. I do like the light output that's for sure, but it's all bunched in there, with just one fan....

 

[Salty Cracker]

LOL! On truck for delivery. So 24 hour delivery from California.

I can't even get amazon to do overnight delivery anymore. Now it remains to be seen if Fedex sends me a brokerage bill in the mail in a month... they've gotten pretty sneaky about that. Still...hard to fault rapidled on that

 

[Pistol]

It's a huge bummer not being able to jump across the river to pick up in the states, there's so much stuff that you just can't get here.

 

[Salty Cracker]

It's a huge bummer not being able to jump across the river to pick up in the states, there's so much stuff that you just can't get here.

Tell me about it. I've taken 5 wheelbarrows of the nastiest crab grass ever out of my yard. Canadian "weed killer" is literally ferric oxide (rust), and all it does is brown the leaves, the only thing I find that can actually bring back a lawn is *real* weed killer from the south.

 

[Pistol]

ya and we're running low on that to.

 

[Salty Cracker]

So it's interesting to take a look at the old fixtures. So in 2010 I revamped the tank, the big things were adding GFO and the LEDs. As I look at the fixtures, about half to 2/3rds of the LEDS have been replaced, but some are still original. I think on this fixture 15 of the lights are 10 years old, but 21 of them have had to be replaced. Now to be fair, most of the failures happened before I had a splash shield in front of the lights, and since I've added a bit of plexi I rarely have any burn-outs at all. So I'd say that LEDs are -fairly- reliable, at least the cree line.

So today I'm replacing all of them , cleaning up the heatsink, etc. Here is a shot of the fixture with the lenses pulled. I'll post a second pic when I get this one done (the first one is already on the tank, I forgot to snap a pic).