There’s a possibility that my unit is not functioning correctly, I belevieve the LED driver is not driving the chip correctly resulting in a huge decrease in output, I messaged one of the co-inventors over on Reef2Reef but I haven’t had a response yet.
I have yet to do a side by side test with a colleague who also has one to see if there is a difference in output, there is also the possibility that my Test Card is defective and the Phosphorescent coating on it is incorrectly applied or damaged in some way.
A few back and forth pics between myself and a colleague there does appear to be a discrepancy. Its easier to show than explain -
This is the colleagues picture illuminating the test card from a distance using the snoot attachment, you can see the full patch glowing.
This is my picture showing how close I need to be to generate illumination in the test patch.
As you can see UV is being produced but at a suboptimal level, removing the snoot you can clearly see a shadow of the diode pattern.
I have seen this behaviour before in COB diodes as I have an intermittently defective near UV blue coral torch that does the same thing, you can focus the torch to produce the diode shadow when it’s operating defectively and then all of a sudden the diode gets full power and the illumination goes from dim to blinding, here’s defective mode (no pic of blinding mode because it’s broken 99.9% of the time).
Once I’ve performed the side by side test with my colleague (when we can find the time and both remember to bring our devices) then I can get a clearer picture as to whether the unit needs replacing or not.
Aiptasia is still affected by it but I have to get so close with the device it be as well of me to just push the aiptasia of the rock!
I wouldn’t count this as a review as it wouldn’t be fair if the unit is defective, I’ll come back to this when I have a clearer sense of what is going on, I can only do this with an accurate comparative analysis.