Plus one on the flow question....
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LED lighting question
- Thread starter mvallee
- Start date
delta
Impatient Reefer
he stated what his in tank flow was
+1 for Richard.
The lights definitely burned your corals! Dial down those percentages, it took me 6 months to work up to 60% with my radions switching from t5s! You have to remember t5 and mh lights direct light in all directions and leds direct light in a much straighter direction making them much much stronger when they dont appear too bright or hot! Your sps look completely burned and the algae looks excessive, might want to get excess nutrients down! I was having similar issues until speaking with archit and yorgos from love the reef and they told me to keep intensities down and keep the whites at a low percentage! I dove in when i switched to radions and experienced all the typical problems i read about regarding to LED's. I have been running my radion pros for 15 months now and have excellent growth and color on all my sps, my frogspawn and duncans have tripled in size in less than 5 months! I have used t5's, halides, halide t5 combos, power compact and led lights so i have experienced all first hand! My acans are the only corals imo that swell up better under t5 or power compact lighting and this doesnt mean that they dont look good i just keep them more out of the light so they swell back up! Leds are fun to play around with; people dive into these lights way to fast and play with them too often! You have to start them low and raise the intensitie slow and DONT TINKER with them often or at all. We all know from this hobby that stability is key so switching something like lighting needs time to acclimate slowly and steadily. I love my LEDs and i have great success with them(longer than a year); I am looking into adding 2 t5s to my radion pros so i can turn them down a bit but stil retain all the features of having a natural light cycle, low heat, low energy, no bulb replacement ever! LEDs are great when understood and used properly. I would add another wp60 to the mix for some more flow, thats a pretty good sized tank and you could always dial the pump down if you needed to!
OP
OP
mvallee
Non-member
Thanks for all the input, Alk has been an issue for me and from previous threads seemed like I should be in the 11 range so will work on that for sure maybe shoot for 10.5 to be safe just taking a reading off fresh mixed RSCP comes back at 12.6 with my salifert test kit so was thinking my readings at 11.5 are within reason.
As far as the lights cutting back on the whites it seems like on the reef breeders the white channel has a lot of what makes this light full spectrum the breakdown is as follows channel 1; 48 450nm royal blue. Channel 2; 22 4500K neutral whites, 10 480nm blues, 4 660nm reds, and 12 410-420nm violets. Channel 3; 3 480nm blue moonlights, for a total of 99 3 watt LEDs. So channel two has the violets and the 480nm blues, reds I don't care about so turning that channel down seems like I would losing some of the blue to, am I right? I know these lights are more than capable to have what I want to keep just somethings not right, my neighbors all tell me it looks like I have a 24 hour rage party going on all the time they are so bright they make my whole downstairs look purple from outside
I do have a phos issue, I have cut back on feedings by giving less amounts of food but I do have a good variety of fish with a couple wrasses that should be fed multiple times but luckily they are happy with flakes as are most of the other inhabitants but definitely need to work on that.
Another concerns though is in the way I set up the tank and curious if this could be the issue. I came from many years of FW fish keeping and it was common practice when aquascaping to put egg crate down under all your rocks, with the aquascape I had in mind for enough live rock for a FOWLR tank I basically have eggcrate over the whole bottom of my tank and I am afraid that is creating dead pockets in my 1.5-2" sandbed and possibly causing my phosphate issue, I am almost afraid to disturb the sandbed now as it has been almost a year but at some point I am going to have to siphon all the sand pull the rocks and remove the eggcrate, not sure how I can pull that off. Thoughts on that? should I be concerned or am I worrying about nothing.
The flow question, I think I have plenty especially where the corals are, I actually turn the Jebao 60 down a bit but the 25 runs at 100% to not have stuff blowing all around and they are hooked up to a JBWave maker so I alternate my pattern from waves to sweeping every couple of weeks and get nice action out of all my corals swaying and I test the flow when I feed flakes looking for dead spots.
As far as the lights cutting back on the whites it seems like on the reef breeders the white channel has a lot of what makes this light full spectrum the breakdown is as follows channel 1; 48 450nm royal blue. Channel 2; 22 4500K neutral whites, 10 480nm blues, 4 660nm reds, and 12 410-420nm violets. Channel 3; 3 480nm blue moonlights, for a total of 99 3 watt LEDs. So channel two has the violets and the 480nm blues, reds I don't care about so turning that channel down seems like I would losing some of the blue to, am I right? I know these lights are more than capable to have what I want to keep just somethings not right, my neighbors all tell me it looks like I have a 24 hour rage party going on all the time they are so bright they make my whole downstairs look purple from outside
I do have a phos issue, I have cut back on feedings by giving less amounts of food but I do have a good variety of fish with a couple wrasses that should be fed multiple times but luckily they are happy with flakes as are most of the other inhabitants but definitely need to work on that.
Another concerns though is in the way I set up the tank and curious if this could be the issue. I came from many years of FW fish keeping and it was common practice when aquascaping to put egg crate down under all your rocks, with the aquascape I had in mind for enough live rock for a FOWLR tank I basically have eggcrate over the whole bottom of my tank and I am afraid that is creating dead pockets in my 1.5-2" sandbed and possibly causing my phosphate issue, I am almost afraid to disturb the sandbed now as it has been almost a year but at some point I am going to have to siphon all the sand pull the rocks and remove the eggcrate, not sure how I can pull that off. Thoughts on that? should I be concerned or am I worrying about nothing.
The flow question, I think I have plenty especially where the corals are, I actually turn the Jebao 60 down a bit but the 25 runs at 100% to not have stuff blowing all around and they are hooked up to a JBWave maker so I alternate my pattern from waves to sweeping every couple of weeks and get nice action out of all my corals swaying and I test the flow when I feed flakes looking for dead spots.
delta
Impatient Reefer
The egg crate can be an issue for sure
Removing the sand is not a problem just do a small amount at a time. I have changed them out by breaking down the entire tank into a horse trough then removing and replacing the sand bed, but I found just siphoning it out over a period of time easier and less stressful.
Removing the sand is not a problem just do a small amount at a time. I have changed them out by breaking down the entire tank into a horse trough then removing and replacing the sand bed, but I found just siphoning it out over a period of time easier and less stressful.
OP
OP
mvallee
Non-member
Any input on this, one of the responses was to turn down the whites a bit but on the whites channel isn't there a lot of the blues and the violets so I would want that somewhat close to the blue levels right. I have seen lots of people run the white channel at about a 2/3 of the blue channel but the reefbreeders seem to be laid out different. or is this just me over thinking this?
A lot of newer led fixtures don't even have a white channel. My pacific Suns have no whites, hydras don't have any whites, and I'm not sure but don't the newest radions not have whites either?
I personally think your intensity was to high. Like some other people said leds are very powerful but it doesn't look like they are. For example my pac sun lamp has no whites so when I installed it and started it at 30% as suggested it seemed so dark. I increase the intensity up to 60% over a few weeks and bleached almost everything. I brought it back down to 30% about 10 months ago and I am only at 52% intensity currently. Key with LEDs, and tanks in general, is to go very slow. Corals take time to acclimate to what your offering to them so by the time they get happy with what they have people change it again. Go slow and stability is the key!
I personally think your intensity was to high. Like some other people said leds are very powerful but it doesn't look like they are. For example my pac sun lamp has no whites so when I installed it and started it at 30% as suggested it seemed so dark. I increase the intensity up to 60% over a few weeks and bleached almost everything. I brought it back down to 30% about 10 months ago and I am only at 52% intensity currently. Key with LEDs, and tanks in general, is to go very slow. Corals take time to acclimate to what your offering to them so by the time they get happy with what they have people change it again. Go slow and stability is the key!
delta
Impatient Reefer
Do not overlook the nutrient and water parameters issue. The LEDs "may" have an impact, but only as the straw the broke the camels back.....The corals were already headed there. The corals look like there is a nutrient issue, as the algae is totally surrounding the coral tissue as the corals are dying. That isn't a lighting issues it is a system health issue. And while corals do take time to acclimate to changes that ability is greatly reduced when your system is not up to par.
Hydra has Cree XP-G2 Cool White
Radion has Cree XT-E cool White
How does pacific Sun create white color?
OP
OP
mvallee
Non-member
I am working on the nutrients, I have added a BRS Dual reactor with the separate chambers for the GFO and Carbon and cut my feedings in half, I try to keep the fish well fed as I have a few reef safe with caution fish, flame and bi color angles, blue jaw trigger and 3 lyretail hawks that are well behaved but from what I read they are well behaved as long as they are fed regularly. I only feed enough that it is consumed in a minute or less so do not think I am overfeeding just can't cut back to once every few days like I know some do. My skimmer pulls skim and needs to be emptied weekly so that is working, I do not run a sock or any other type of mechanical filtration in my sump other than an additional 50 pounds of rock (that I move around regularly to keep clean) and a skimmer I wonder if adding filter socks could help, I just found them to be a pain to change out and read most people do not bother after a while?
After almost a year it is still a work in progress, I guess that's what makes this a hobby my FW tanks were always fun during the setup and fish acquiring but then got boring.
After almost a year it is still a work in progress, I guess that's what makes this a hobby my FW tanks were always fun during the setup and fish acquiring but then got boring.
JasonandSarah
Non-member
They have 6 Led fixtures and 3 of them use whites. 1 uses neutral white, one uses warm white and the other uses neutral and cool white.
I'd assume that they don't use the whites on the others because there's enough white in the T5's? Gives the options between a 16k tank and a 20k tank I guess.
They also list all their Leds as Cree for the most part but that's it, No specific bins or even the exact kind of Cree they are?
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letoan
Non-member
If you look closely at the 2 current Pandora Hyperion's LED cluster, XM-L is in there. The old R2 have XM-L for white and XTE/XPE for other colors. Which big mfg out there tell you which bin in the fixture that we're getting?
JasonandSarah
Non-member
Yeah your right exact bins aren't handed out. But some company's do say their regular fixture utilizes mid level bins and the "Pro" uses top bin leds. Not that I'm spitting out names of companys! Lol
RiverRat
Non-member
I have a Pac Sun light, it has no whites and I don't use T5. I believe it has the full spectrum with specially made (three kinds?) diodes, so white is not needed.
If you had too much light, I don't think you would see all that healthy coralline growing around your frags. It would have fried also. I am not familiar with the fixture your using so it's hard to compare but I am using hydra52 and all the blues and violet get to 100% and the whites 80%. Green, red and UV are lower. So it sounds to me like you don't have enough light. It would be best though to ask someone else who runs your fixture and compare to them. Regardless of the intensity you finally settle on, you should increase your day length to 12hrs. Try not to have peak intensity last longer than 4 hours and definitely get your alk down. High alk and high intensity light are bad bad bad for your sps.
Yes! Bingo!
Color blending DO NOT work for coral, it only work for human eyes with human brain. You need white LED.
That's an interesting theory... so what happens to corals when they don't get this white led and over what period of time?
Also do you have any scientific proof of this or just personal experience / opinion?
Thanks,
- Archit
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