Just before the Thanksgiving holiday I noticed two of my lights were not working. I have
a mix of Ecotech Radion Gen 2 and Gen 4 lights and they’ve been running without many issues
for the past 6 years - but it’s time to update the tank and that includes the lights.
I did some troubleshooting, lights are expensive after all, and found that somehow two of the
ballasts were dead. It’s very odd that two would go at the same time, but that’s what
happened - maybe a power transient or something that I didn’t notice.
I’ve been thinking about an upgrade for a long time. I particularly wanted some of
the newer lights that are totally silent - things like the Philips CoralView Gen2 or the ATI
Straton, or other lights like those. On an older tank I had an ATI Powermodule full of
T5 lights, and it was great, so I had a good experience with the quality delivered by ATI.
Philips, on the other hand, actually makes the LEDs. Like Kessil, they have complete
control over the fixture all the way down to the diodes, and I like that idea. Everyone
else is buying LEDs and building around them, ATI and EcoTech Marine included.
I read a bunch of reviews on Reef2Reef, and when it was all said and done the ATI Straton
stood out to me as the best pick for my tank. They have a clean modern design, they have
the power to cover my 36” wide tank front to back, and they have a lot of other nice
features as well.
I bought these lights on sale from SaltwaterAquarium.com and they quickly shipped. I was impressed
with the packaging, and the lights were shipped together in a larger box with reinforced corners,
with their own boxes inside secondary boxes. For large expensive items, I couldn’t ask
for a better shipping method.
The Straton itself is a very thin 18.5 inch square, comes with a hanging kit, and is claimed
to light up to a 30 by 30 inch area. Let’s see how well that works. I put a 30 by 30
square on my floor using tape, and I set the light up so that it’s using the community
“shallow reef” setting for light acclimated corals. The instructions indicate that the
Straton should be hung at least 15 centimeters above the water’s surface, so here’s what
that would look like.
My tank is 24” deep, so let’s raise the light by 24” and see what the coverage at
the bottom of my tank would then be with the light still 15 centimeters over the water’s
surface.
There are 153 LEDs in a Straton, and you can control seven colors individually. You can
also control the front, middle, and back as a group on their own - which lets you do some
neat effects or tune the lights specifically to the corals you have. It features 18 405nm
UV, 18 420nm violet, 18 450nm royal blue, 36 470nm blue, 36 white, 18 500nm cyan, and
9 red leds. All diodes are rated for 5 watts, and though we don’t know the specific brand
used, we know that they’re under-driven at only about 30% of their rated power - so
these LEDs should stay cool and last a very long time.
I really like that the ATI Stratons come with their own wifi and controller software built
in. For my Radions I had to buy a ReefLink, then use an online tool called Ecosmart live,
and then now something called Mobius that never really worked for me. There’s a lot
that can go wrong there, and even over time companies can come and go. What happens if
the company running your tank’s software gets bought out? Who knows! I think it’s
better to have your own controller that doesn’t rely on anything hosted by someone else.
One of the first things I noticed when I opened the box was the off the shelf Mean Well XLG-200-24-A
power supply. This is incredible, and something more companies should do - unlike the custom
power supplies used by many manufacturers you can easily buy a replacement Mean Well
supply for about 45 dollars, and they’re very high quality. Props to ATI for this choice!
They even have built in surge protection, in case your own power strip doesn’t offer
protection.
Though I wouldn’t recommend it, the Mean Well supply is IP67 rated which means it can
be submersed without issue for short periods of time. This could be a lifesaver, in case
you splash it under your tank by mistake. It also carries a 5 year warranty from Mean
Well though you might have trouble actually using that since you don’t buy these from
Mean Well directly. At the other end of the waterproof spectrum is the ATI controller
box, which is very close to the power supply and very much not waterproof.
The light likely won’t light up when you first turn it on. Keep that in mind, you need
to connect to a WIFI network that it creates and configure it before the light will work.
Alternatively, and something I also really like, you can use an ethernet cord to connect
the controller to your network - so if you have an ethernet port handy that could be
an ideal way to connect it where wifi interference won’t cause you any issues. It supports
both 10 and 100 megabit ethernet.
The controller itself is pretty sparse, with most of the components being embedded inside
the Onion Omega 2+ that they’re using for the CPU, Wifi, RAM, and everything else. It
supports 2G 802.11 b g and n wifi, and runs OpenWRT Linux by default on a 580 Mhz CPU.
It features 32 megabytes of flash disk, and 128 megabytes of ram. So really, a pretty
capable little computer for building internet of things projects with. If you did need to
replace the controller, nothing is soldered on and you can simply pop open the case and
unplug the wires.
One thing to note - if you don’t have good Wifi access, and you also can’t run an ethernet
cord, the Omega 2+ does have an unused wifi antenna connector that you could plug something
into - so keep that in mind if Wifi under your tank is just barely there. You could
add a wifi antenna easily.
The controller website itself is quick and responsive, and lets you configure the schedule
for your lights. You can also configure new custom colors if you don’t like the preset
values. Interestingly, you can create groups out of the front, middle, and back of the
lights and control all your fixtures from just one website. I plan on doing a video
all about the controller software itself, but right now I’m still learning it and
so I don’t want to tell you the wrong thing.
Another thing I’ve come to expect from internet connected devices is endless analytics being
sent to who knows where. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the ATI Straton - it is
only sending data up when I’m accessing the website for the controller. The web controller
software also doesn’t have Google Analytics or anything like that in it. This is nice,
but I do wonder - if ATI did have some analytics in these, what would they improve on for V2?
I’d be ok with opting into some basic analytics about how the lights and controller software
are used if given the choice.
If something goes wrong, you can factory reset the device by holding down a button on the
controller until both of the green LEDs near the ethernet port are solid green. It will
then reset back to the factory settings, and should start broadcasting it’s setup wifi
network again after a few minutes. Give it time, a full reboot does seem to take a few
minutes from start to being available on your home network again.
What about PAR? I’ve seen some comments on Reef2Reef about Acropora photoinhibition
and so I’m doing some research on that - more to come in a future video. Using the Shallow
Reef preset schedule, which has the lights at 90% brightness during the middle of the
day, and with my 24 inch tall tank and the light about 7 and a half inches over the water,
the PAR at the bottom of my tank is around 100 directly under the lights. At the water’s
surface, it’s around 600. I’d like to optimize this schedule some, but it’s a
good starting off point.
I think PAR values between 100 to maybe 300 or 400 are likely to be best for most Acropora
and most commonly kept corals, with some soft corals liking even less light. I think 24”
tall is a good average value for reef tanks, so these lights should be able to provide
great light levels to most tanks.
I thought perhaps I could get away with just two lights over my 6 foot wide tank. As a
reminder, my tank is 6 feet long, 2 feet deep, and 3 feet wide. With the lights mounted towards
the ends of the tank, and a gap of 2 feet between the fixtures, PAR at the bottom of
the tank in the very middle is only about 60, so I’ll need to get a third fixture,
and I’m glad I left space between the units for that third Straton to be installed.
The lights don’t really heat up. It’s been running here for several hours, and the
top surface of the light is 102.1 fahrenheit. As it has no fans, it’s totally silent - an
amazing selling point when you’re working from home during COVID and the tank is in
your office. Really, this is such a difference from the Radion’s I had previously. You
don’t notice the fan noise until it’s not there. I can’t overstate the difference
it makes, even more so since I work from home and the tank is in my office.
I’ll make a follow up video all about the software. It’s pretty feature complete,
allowing you to do pretty much everything you’d want. It automatically connects to
other Straton’s added to your home network, and all the units are controlled together
as one. It’s pretty nice!
I’m very happy with these lights so far. I’m waiting on a Triton test to determine
if I need to get rid of my existing rock due to any possible copper they might have absorbed,
and as soon as I get those results back I’m planning on doing a whole new aquascape for
the tank. Exciting times for sure!
Hopefully this first impressions video was interesting for you. If you have questions
about the ATI Straton let me know in the comments down below and I’ll try to answer them as
best I can with my limited knowledge. Thanks for watching! Subscribe for the update on
the software.
Be kind to each other, stay safe, and have a fantastic day!
Bye!