12h Photoperiod -- What are your thoughts?

[Rakie]

Was talking with a friend and noted how often times, aquarium photoperiod is very short compared to real life sunrise/sunset. I personally follow the sunrise / sunset. My light ramps up from 7am until 8am. Then slowly ramps down from 5pm to 8pm.

I actually do this for my fish -- In my room, I leave my windows open all the time, and noticed that when I started my lighting period later, my fish would be tentatively out and about, seemingly waiting for the light to turn on, so I gave 'em what they wanted.

This made me wonder, as I see a lot of people light for only 8 hours -- What are your thoughts? Good, bad, irrelevant, concerns.

 

[BigCitySmallReef]

This is a great topic. I've also tried to run sunrise/sunset times. I start my ramp up at 8AM and it finishes at 10PM, and my corals seems to love it. I also run AI Prime HD lunar cycle.

 

[rossco]

I have been running a 16 hour light cycle for probably 10 years. With my current Radions, I ramp up to low level blues at the beginning, main photo period for 8 hours then low level blue until midnight. No ill effects that I’ve seen and I can enjoy the corals the whole day.

When I ran T5 and before that, Metal Halide I did the same thing. With the T5 I used a blue ReefBrite, and back when I ran Metal Halide it was a pair of VHO actinic at first and then when Sunbrite happened, I ran a pair of those along with the MH.

 

[Luno]

The thing most people don't realize is when you run your lights on a certain photo period it's consistent. Out in nature light is never consistent, there can be days and days in a row that due to cloud cover, and other weather the actual intensity and amount of sun light the reef receives is minimized. So in reality even though In nature a reef may receive a longer photo period of time on a good summer day than we light our aquariums. When averaged out how much light and intensity a reef receives over the course of a year, compared to our consistently lit tanks you will be surprised at the difference.

Now the big question is can we improve on nature? That's the million dollar question

 

[Luno]

In saying that I do believe in the ramp up ramp down. Nothing scientific behind it other than nature does it so do I.

 

[BigCitySmallReef]

Yeah, I agree with trying to mimic mother nature as much as possible. I was using the weather option for the AI PRIME, but the lightning almost gave me a heart attack and I was worried it would make my goby jump. I really wish they would improve that feature with more customization options.

 

[BillyP]

I personally use a 12 hour photoperiod and see nothing wrong with it, the corals acclimated to the new photoperiod pretty fast as I kept adding 30 minutes every week from 8 hours till I got to 12 hours. I took it a little slow because I have metal halides and t5's. I don't think that we should completely mimic mother nature as almost everything we have is artificial. But I still agree that in some ways we should. But not lighting.

 

[madweazl]

Think I've always had a 12hr photo-period and it was always centered around times I'd be able to view it the most. I had started to setup the controller to run the lights based on the real-time photo-period of the Great Barrier Reef with storms (periods of cloud cover and nothing else) but never finished it up.

 

[blebs]

11 hour photo period from 1pm to 12am, so that when i come home from work i can enjoy my tank. The fish are used to the cycle, even though natural sunlight does creep in and light up the tank in the morning.

I had a bluestar leopard that I had to black out the windows for b/c it was waking up too early and going to bed before I came home. Now that it is used to the feeding/lighting time, there is no blackout of the windows.

I have a kessil and aquaticlife hybrid, the 2x t5 come on 30 min after LED turns on, and 2x t5 come on 1 hour after LED. I use NO LED ramping. the staggered t5s do put in some minimal form of ramping, but I have debated just putting all the lights on at the same time, more so because I am running out of outets on my apex.

 

[OriginalUserName]

I have a 13 hour period right now with the first couple and last couple hours seeing the lights as blue and low intensity as possible. For me, if anything it's a practical reason in that I want to actually see my tank. If I had a 10 hour lighting period I would either need to shift it and only see the tank at night or the AM or not see it at all.

 

[mtraylor]

mine is over 12 hours

 

[29bonsaireef]

I think it all comes down an individuals tank. I run my photoperiod 6 or 8 hrs, no ramping on my tanks. This works for me and my corals are happy. Others run 12+hrs and that works for them. I don't think mimicking the natural dusk/dawn or natural light hrs will necessarily give any advantage over lights on/off full blast.

If we could mimic the spectrums and par values the corals are growing naturally. Then we may have an advantage to better placement/lighting etc..

 

[DarkSky]

Mine is over 12 currently, but it's strictly ramp up / down LED actinics. The main lighting are 10k T5s which are on for about 8 hours. I also switched to this type of light schedule because I noticed the wrasses were out and swimming in the dark, so I scheduled some light for when they were active and looking for pods.

 

[ThunderGoose]

I'd love to have a longer photoperiod but I already struggle with algae and I worry that more light would mean more algae.

 

[apt220]

I run a 14 hour photoperiod but partly because i want to be able to see the tank whenever I'm awake. If this were not a factor, I would run it at least 12 hours per day.

Coincidentally, I recently made a video about this:

 

[BoomCorals]

I run 12 hours. Halides. Come at me bro.

 

[Mattrg02]

How about acclimating corals to longer photo period? What’s harder on a new frag, high par or long photo periods?

 

[Camaro Show Corals]

High par

 

[lbacha]

I run about 11.5 but my lighting doesn't start till noon and goes till 11:30pm. This allows me to really enjoy the peak hours of light (around 3-8pm) and then the ramp down which has some amazing colors

 

[Camaro Show Corals]

Just bought a new xr15 and looking forward to playing with all the modes lol