Changing my lighting to be more blue, looking for input

[Ghost25]

I have a Chinese LED light. It's the MarsAqua 300W (300W is the model not the actual wattage). The light has a blue channel and a white channel, each channel has a power cord, switch, and dial.

The dial works, but even at the lowest setting the whites are quite bright. Since turning down the whites so they are at their minimum setting my coral colors have improved dramatically. Currently both channels are on the same timer and both run for 8 hours a day.

I want to experiment with leaving the blues on for 8 hours and running the whites for only some of that time. What do you guys think would be a good starting point? I was thinking maybe turn the whites off for one hour at each end of the cycle so it's all blue for the first and last hour. Thoughts?

 

[Halal Hotdog]

Everything I have been reading recently indicate that the 'white' channel is the full spectrum that really promotes growth. I don't think it will be harmful to any of your corals, but keep an eye on the growth. I would be interested to see if you noticed a decrease in growth rates.

 

[Crabs McJones]

I have a Chinese LED light. It's the MarsAqua 300W (300W is the model not the actual wattage). The light has a blue channel and a white channel, each channel has a power cord, switch, and dial.

The dial works, but even at the lowest setting the whites are quite bright. Since turning down the whites so they are at their minimum setting my coral colors have improved dramatically. Currently both channels are on the same timer and both run for 8 hours a day.

I want to experiment with leaving the blues on for 8 hours and running the whites for only some of that time. What do you guys think would be a good starting point? I was thinking maybe turn the whites off for one hour at each end of the cycle so it's all blue for the first and last hour. Thoughts?

Those lights are a powerhouse for par, they don't need to be turned up very high to get high numbers, check out BRS's video on the 165 watt black box, that was only one light and they were getting into the 700's for par. If you have each channel on a timer, you could do sort of a sunrise and sunset effect, have the blues come on first, and then delay the white to come on an hour to 90 minutes after that, and shut off an hour to 90 minutes before your blues. You definitely want to keep the white channel running though, corals do utilize the white red and green spectrum

 

[Tuffyyyyy]

I think you've got a good idea. You could always have the whites turn off when you're at your viewing hours. i.e. I run straight blues with some red while I'm sitting on the couch and run the Coral Labs program outside of that. So start with your whites on for the first X hours and then have them turn off later in the day.

 

[Ghost25]

OK I went ahead and setup the lighting as mentioned, 8 hours of blue with 6 hours of white in the middle (1 hour of blue only at the beginning and end.) I took some pictures with both channels on for later comparison. All photos were taken with ISO 100, shutter speed 1/50, F1.6, WB 6600K, manual focus. Lighting settings shown in photo. I'll use these as comparison to see if the colors improve.

 

[Michael Naegeli]

I just Love Blue. I have 2 72” Reefright blues and Kessil ap700. Absolutely Insane Combo.