can someone explain coral lighting?
- Thread starter jaws222
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Depends on how willing you are to pay for beauty. You can buy AI prime HD for 200.00 and have the best/happiest zoas. In my opinion, a prime would be amazing, this depends on the size of your aquarium though.
Not really, personal opinion I guess. I just like the technological advances this light has. I can control it from my phone, change the color of the lights to my liking, a timer so I don’t have to worry about switching it on and off like a biocube. Also, it’s very powerful and it would grow about anything and make it supper happy! What size tank do you have?
Brett S
Valuable Member
The short version is that corals are photosynthetic. They get much of their food and energy from the sun. So you need to have a light that can replicate the sun over your aquarium. The two important things to look at are the intensity of the light and the spectrum. Lights that will support corals are very bright. A ‘regular‘ LED aquarium light might be 8 or 10 watts, whereas lights designed for corals are often 100 or 150 watts or even more. The color of the light, or the spectrum is important as well. Corals need light of a certain wavelength to be able to use it. If you just got the brightest light that you could find and put it over your tank it still wouldn’t support corals unless it had the spectrum that the corals needed.
There are a lot of options for lights that will support corals, but none of them are particularly cheap.
attiland
2500 Club Member
The whole RGB is important not just specific colours. Whatever you buy make sure it can adjust every aspect of the light individually and have presets too so you have somewhere to start from.
Lights are a whole sub topic in saltwater hobby and takes significant time even to have good understanding of the basics. You will find people fight for their opinion to be right and many of them don’t have the whole picture of why’s and how’s.
You want to get a light that is made for corals that can support them and help them maintain their best colors. This means spectrum and sufficient power which usually means large heatsink and/or fans.
On a tank that size, expect to spend at least 100 dollars if you go the cheaper route and get a Mars aqua or Vispectra black box.
Otherwise it can add up to a few hundred easily. Look for lights made for coral reefs and stick to main brands or proven off brands.
Don’t cheap out too much or you end up buying twice.
Weasel1960
Valuable Member
@jaws222, I would suggest looking into some of the videos on the Bulk Reef Supply web site. They do a great job of explaining T5, MH, and LED lighting and how to use them in combination and why. I plan on using combinations of T5 and LED myself. T5 will get you the best all around light with no shadows using an assortment of bulbs. The LED to add shimmer and intensity.
