I have a 6 foot ATI SunPower T 5 light for my 180 gallon Marine aquarium. I am restarting my tank soon and would like to do things different. I want to have docile fish and soft coral, but I am unsure what bulbs I should go with to have the best results for my coral. Also how far above the water should the light fixture be. I am working on changing my hood around so its ready for the new set up. I have been thinking of putting an inline uv sterilizer but would like to make sure that makes sense. I have read a little on line but you know how that goes. I would also like to know if wave makers should be used in the tank with the soft corral. I think this is it for now. I appreciate any help given
Ati sunpower
- Thread starter buya27
- Start date
- Tagged users None
Anthony Wood
Active Member
12"+ off the water if you don't want to roast all your soft corals. I have the same fixture over my tank 6x80W. If you find that the corals aren't getting enough light by some freak chance that I don't for see you can just lower he fixture. I think you'll run into the issue of too much light and in that case just raise the fixture or simply swap out bulbs for ones with low PAR output. Mine is 10" off the water surface of my Acropora dominated 125g tank So it works out to be 30" off the sand bed. I read somewhere (maybe on the ATI website) that its recommended for our light to be 30"-36" off the sand bed of the tank. Hope that helps!
Anthony Wood
Active Member
Yikes! haha its not about the distance off the water surface I found it easier to adjust height based on the height of the fixtures from the sand bed. If you think about distance off the sand bed it negates tank height (water depth) because 12" off the water surface of a 30" tall tank is way different then 12" off the water surface of the 22" tall tank. But 30" off the sand bed of a 30" tall tank is the same on a 22" tall tank. So the par numbers should be close to the same on both tanks.
I personally run
4-Blue+
1-Aquablue secial
1-true actinic
Anthony Wood
Active Member
Oh and for any of those who are trying to figure out what fan speed to put their sunpowers on. I got ahold of ATI North America about what the operating temps on their bulbs are suppose to be. I was told depending on the spot of the bulb it's going to be different generally speaking you should aim for 95 degrees F but didn't give a specific location. The end where the fans comes through will obviously be the lowest and rise from there. So with a IR temp gun taking into account for a some lee way in error for a variety of factors I had to run my ATI fans on full blast to get the middle of the bulb as close to the ideal 95F. My friend who has the 6x24W fixture needed to run his fans on half if I remember correctly. I assumed that because a majority of coral is going to be placed closer to the middle of the tank then the outter edges so if the middle was as close to the ideal 95F the rest of the bulbs temp range would fall into the ideal temp range accordingly. Obviously these temps were taken after the bulbs temp had fully leveled out and stopped rising meaning it was fully warmed up to operating temp. Someone correct me if my assumption is wrong by it thought it was a well educated guess haha.
