I temporarily mounted 1 of the 3 coralcare fixtures I have received over the display to gain a better feeling on spread and spectrum. For mounting I am using 2 5ft 1" 80/20 bars mounted to the ceiling using 4x wire hangers. The wire hangers each support up to 60lbs so this should be plenty for 3 fixtures in the end. The metal bars mount directly to the 80/20 using standard 80/20 hardware. The bars being displayed are actually 4 ft spares I had while I wait for my 5ft sections to arrive.
Coralcare lights - First impressions:
The first light I received I actually won from BRS as part of their 20k light give away. Unfortunately they packaged it very poorly for shipping with very little packing. This light was repackaged since they used it in house. As I picked up the box I felt it sliding freely around inside the box, I had a panic attack at that point. But to my surprise after opening it, the light was in very good shape. Some very minor, barely noticeable scuff marks, but nothing broken. I will say this, yes the lights are heavy and BIG... but dang they are built like a tank. For something to take that much abuse during shipping with minimal wear, shows how well constructed it really is. So overall, they are some super durable lights!
Here is the fixture over my display. Tank is 3/4 full since I was still slowly filling it over multiple days (slow RODI). As you can see the fixture is big, but actually pretty slim for its size. Running without the controller you will get 100% blue, and 100% white but no way to change that without their controller. For one light at about 9" up, you can see it actually puts out some massive and even spread.
So first I turned the fixture to 100% blues since the biggest thing I've heard about these lights is that the blue isn't deep enough for many peoples liking. To my surprise it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. The blue channel has a decent balance and a good blue spectrum. I have yet to put corals under it to get the full picture but so far it meets or exceeds my expectations. I was planning on supplementing with 1 6ft XHO Reefbrite fixture, but at this point I do not know if its required to add that 'pop'. That being said, for my displays I do like running a more white/natural profile. My current display uses 4x Gen5 XR15 Pros. I went with the pros over the blues since the blues are just too much blues for my liking. I run a Gen5 XR30 Blue on my 75gal nem tank and have trouble getting that balanced white/blue that I like for mid-day viewing. Note, I did mix up the sandbed before these following pictures so that's why the tank is cloudy now, but it does show the spread much more.
Full white: Here is the output with only whites. Some pretty serious output.
100/100 Whites and Blues: Both channels full output. Most lights I wouldn't dare running at 100% but the philips oversized passive heatsink barely gets warm running them like this. The other nice thing is that these lights are made to last and be repairable.. not disposable. I believe you can get replacement LED panels from Coralvue/Philips in the future if you ever did have an issue.
Finally going back to the 100% white setup, you can see that 1 single fixture provides almost 3ft of spread around midtank and 4 ft of spread at the sand bed. That's some serious spread with a very even coverage. 3 fixtures on this tank will be more than enough.
Looking at the spread also makes me feel that these would be amazing for larger shallow frag tanks. Mounted up 15-20" you most likely could cover a 4ft by 4ft frag tank where as it would take multiple radion fixtures to cover.
Next up... mounting all 3 units, fill the tank to the top, and do some PAR and PUR measurements. I have both the MQ510 par meter and the seneye meter (PUR). I will do a bunch of readings and report back after!
If you have any questions drop them below.
