LED reef lighting dangerous?!

[A.m.P]

On 12/16/2019 at 5:00 PM, TJReef said:

I understand this is an old thread, but many people here don’t understand the point they were trying to make is that the long term effect on staring at the tank under blue spectrum, not the LED itself. Hope they continue this interesting topic as I wanted to find out As well. Peace.

The main issue with making that a point is that it's parallel or derivative-of the arguments against blue-lights in electronics which have widely been debunked or refuted. In the same fashion wearing polarized sunglasses won't give you some inane disorder from filtering out UV and some violets, being in a marginally more blue-room is unlikely to cause any issues either. Almost definitely not to your eyes and certainly not to your skin, your lights are bright but not *that* bright and only VERY specific leds BUILT to produce UV light do so, even what we in the hobby call UV is just the very-tip of the UVA spectrum and totally-harmless.

 

However staring directly at your post lens-focused lighting or a direct reflection of it is still a bad idea.

 

To go into a bit more detail, because I can't help myself, the entire OP premise relied on LEDs being some kind of hyper-point source of lighting and they simply are not. Hobby-level LEDs are more point source than cylinders of excited gas, but not by any game-changing degree, on top of that our LED's are all lensed for *dispersion* not focused to a point.

 

The cree spec warnings are for use-cases, but you're still looking for specifically-manufactured LEDs if you want to make an effective laser.

 

This far down the road and there still aren't bluelight exposure safety warnings tagged on every electronic device and our LED's, and it's not because of "big lighting" suppressing the science and endangering us all lol.