Askoll Pure Marine XL HC Led is a complete and compact marine aquarium ready to use , an All In One as they say nowadays.
This article is also available in 
italiano.
I must confess that when we talk about Askoll I’m partial, because my aquaristic life is born in the past century just with an Askoll Tenerife 65. We have come a long way since that day. Let’ see all the details of this new tank.
We can split marine aquariums into two categories. The first one includes all the tanks that are built starting from the glasses and then buying all the accessories required, e.g. the cabinet, the technical equipment, the lights. On the other hand we have the All in One aquariums, meaning those ready to use just out of their box. Askoll Pure Marine XL HC Led just owns to this category of aquariums.
A complete aquarium, compact, plug and play, and ready to use. It has almost everything that it needs to work properly. Let’s see it in details and after we’ll give you some tips to manage it at the top of its game.
Askoll Pure Marine XL HC LED in details
First of all we see the technical features of the new aquarium Pure Marine XL, that was launched on the market over the last few days.
- Dimensions: 76x36x57(h) cm;
- Internal height: max 50 cm;
- Glass thickness: 4 mm short side, 6 mm long edge;
- Capacity: 130 l;
- Filtration: 4 steps (gross mechanical, fine mechanical, chemical and biological) hidden in the top;
- Maximum filter flow: 370 l/h;
- Maximum pump flow: 800 l/h;
- Pump power: 5,5 watt;
- Lighting: lighting LED system with dawn and dusk effect and night light. Provided with a digital timer with touch panel and power supply;
- Colour temperature: 20.000° K;
- Light intensity: 2.400 Lumen;
- Power consumption of the lighting system: 25 watt;
- Kind of LED: 60 white, 8 red, 20 actinic blu;
- Wave length of the actinic LED: 450 nm;
- Heating power: 250 watt;
- Price: between 350 and 400 euros.
As you can see it’s a pretty well-rounded aquarium. There is a LED lighting system provided with its own timer, a filter with pump, and as you can see from the pictures it is provided with filter materials too for the first set-up. These materials are mechanical sponges, zeolite, carbon and ceramic elements. A heater is provided too. The only thing missing to make it a real marine aquarium is a couple of 650-1.300 l/h movement pumps, depending on what we want to breed. We made several reviews on these pages so you’ll just have to have a trip in our propeller pumps dedicated area you can find here.
The external size of the tank is 76x36x57 cm; given the glasses thickness and the place on the top for the filter and lighting system, it means an internal volume of 130 litres. My congratulations to Askoll that declares the real volume of the tank and not, as most companies do, the external volume, that we remember would be much higher (about 156 litres).
LED lightings of Askoll Pure Marine XL HC Led
One of the innovation of this wonderful marine aquarium is the lighting system, that abandoned neons in favor of the well over efficient LED. In this aquarium we have a 25 watt LED bar with 60 white LED, 8 red and 20 actinic blue. The system has got a built-in timer that allows different switching-on of the LED in two channels. The first channel turns on white and red, and the second one turns on the blue.
Above we see the timer, that consists of a touch screen display with three buttons. Operating is quite simple. Once you set the time and the lighting timetable, the blue channel of the LED bar will turn on two hours before the established time. In this case dawn mode is activated and it takes the blue channel from zero to 100% in half an hour, then goes on with the blue only for one hour and a half. After the time set, the white channel will turn on, with the same logic, and in half an hour white and red turn on from 0 to 100%. At the time set for the switch-off, it start dimmering white and red off for 30 minutes, and after one hour and a half the blue will turn off in 30 minutes.
A nice idea the self-disconnecting display that turns off when not in use for a long time, and it is restored by pressing the three buttons together.
We know that lighting is essential to manage a marine aquarium, so we made some measurements with our equipment.
Power Consumption
The detection of the instant consumption of the LED bar was made possible thanks to the instrument RCE PM600. The result is given in Watt.
We also measured the consumption with only the blue channel on.
The value detected is good. In line with what Askoll declares, only with a 10% difference that could be explained thanks to a voltage difference during the test.
Light power
Things got interesting when we measured also the PAR value, expressed in PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density) in μmol m-2 s-1 with the best instrument on the market, Quantum Meter MQ-510 by Apogee. This device is calibrated to work underwater, so when it is used in the air the resulting value must be divided by 1,32 that is the correction factor of immersion. We didn’t have water, when we made our test, so we have to make the conversion.
At first we measured the value with both channels turned on:
Next is with the blue channel only:
We have to remember that the two values must be divided by the factor of immersion that is 1,32:
- White and red channel: 237 μmol m-2 s-1;
- Blue channel: 61 μmol m-2 s-1.
Specifically we can see that white-red channel gives 237/27,5=8,6 μmol m-2 s-1 per watt, while the blue channel 81/8,3=7,3 μmol m-2 s-1 per watt.
With these detected values, in the middle of the Led bar, at a 20 cm distance in the air, we are sure that it is possible to breed some easy corals like Soft ones, and maybe also some LPS. We show you some pictures of them in the following gallery:
On page two we analize the filter, the pump, the heater and the tank details
