xrouter
Community Member
I decided to write this story as a warning to you all to hopefully not fall into the trap I did of thinking a PAR meter was optional part of this hobby and that you can set up your LED light by using your eye because you can't. You can have success and you can be lucky but you can't know why, your in the dark (pun intended 
) in the same way as you are by thinking you can not check your water params.
I have a year old custom tank that was doing really well. All my corals were growing fast and I had an amazing hammer tree, Blue, Green yellow and I did this without a PAR meter, I just hung two black box spectra lights over the tank with a plan to upgrade those lights for a journey into SPS at a later stage. This was pure luck on my part, I tuned the boxes to 30% on white and 20% on the blue and left them and everything loved it. Easy right?
I slowly upgraded my kit, filter socks to Roller, every bit of APEX kit I could, automated everything. As part of that I upgraded those lights to AI Primes, set them to about 40% with high UV/BLUE.. this make sense when you compare the units and consider that differences but boy was I wrong.
The light level looked similar but day 2 a few of my coral didn't open in the morning, so what had I got wrong. Maybe the higher blue content and less white was the issue so I tuned down the blues and up'ed the white and low and behold everything opened. Great, everything is OK and doing fine and did so for another few months until my LPS starts to shrink. Its pretty easy to guess the issue at this point because well you read the title but when you are me in the thick of it the points did not connect.
In that period of a few months I had added a roller filter and had to stop my NoPox dosing because now my sump was mature and with a roller my Nitrate & Phosphate were zero. I had also added plenty of other coral and they seem to be doing OK. The assumption I made after research was I needed to get phosphate up and so I increased feeding and adjusted roller etc. In the mean time my LPS is now looking bad and I'm starting to consider light to be an issue here so I ordered the PAR meter but due to supply problems it took a month to arrive.
Some of you may be thinking why didn't I try adjusting my lights? Well I did, I tried going up but the thing is a LPS that is suffering from shortage of light will visibly shrink back from more light. I suspect they were already at beyond being saved at that point and this goes to my point, I was just guessing. I was tinkering with a gauge and hoping that my coral will look better but that gauge could easily bleach out and kill my other corals. What if I had too much light already and that was what was killing them? Can I risk nuking the entire tank and actually reducing the light the LPS would actually puff up more and look healthier for a bit so I had no base line at all.
By the time the PAR meter for the apex arrived I had lost 3 large LPS heads and others are looking bad. I measured the PAR in the LPS area and I'm reading 10-20....That moment for me was hard to take that I needed at least 4x the light in the tank and I had killed them.
Once I increased my PAR to 70 in the LPS area the whole tank sprang back into life as I moved frags into ideal light areas. It was only by seeing the difference that I realised my other corals were simply surviving in adverse conditions. And now I know the PAR in every corner of my tank, I don't need to put a frag into the tank and wonder if it will do OK there, flow allowing I know it has the right light level.
Its still fingers crossed on a few LPS but ladies and gent do not run without knowing your PAR and specifically if you are changing your lights make sure you get it rechecked because you will not see the issue until it is very much too late.
) in the same way as you are by thinking you can not check your water params.I have a year old custom tank that was doing really well. All my corals were growing fast and I had an amazing hammer tree, Blue, Green yellow and I did this without a PAR meter, I just hung two black box spectra lights over the tank with a plan to upgrade those lights for a journey into SPS at a later stage. This was pure luck on my part, I tuned the boxes to 30% on white and 20% on the blue and left them and everything loved it. Easy right?
I slowly upgraded my kit, filter socks to Roller, every bit of APEX kit I could, automated everything. As part of that I upgraded those lights to AI Primes, set them to about 40% with high UV/BLUE.. this make sense when you compare the units and consider that differences but boy was I wrong.
The light level looked similar but day 2 a few of my coral didn't open in the morning, so what had I got wrong. Maybe the higher blue content and less white was the issue so I tuned down the blues and up'ed the white and low and behold everything opened. Great, everything is OK and doing fine and did so for another few months until my LPS starts to shrink. Its pretty easy to guess the issue at this point because well you read the title but when you are me in the thick of it the points did not connect.
In that period of a few months I had added a roller filter and had to stop my NoPox dosing because now my sump was mature and with a roller my Nitrate & Phosphate were zero. I had also added plenty of other coral and they seem to be doing OK. The assumption I made after research was I needed to get phosphate up and so I increased feeding and adjusted roller etc. In the mean time my LPS is now looking bad and I'm starting to consider light to be an issue here so I ordered the PAR meter but due to supply problems it took a month to arrive.
Some of you may be thinking why didn't I try adjusting my lights? Well I did, I tried going up but the thing is a LPS that is suffering from shortage of light will visibly shrink back from more light. I suspect they were already at beyond being saved at that point and this goes to my point, I was just guessing. I was tinkering with a gauge and hoping that my coral will look better but that gauge could easily bleach out and kill my other corals. What if I had too much light already and that was what was killing them? Can I risk nuking the entire tank and actually reducing the light the LPS would actually puff up more and look healthier for a bit so I had no base line at all.
By the time the PAR meter for the apex arrived I had lost 3 large LPS heads and others are looking bad. I measured the PAR in the LPS area and I'm reading 10-20....That moment for me was hard to take that I needed at least 4x the light in the tank and I had killed them.
Once I increased my PAR to 70 in the LPS area the whole tank sprang back into life as I moved frags into ideal light areas. It was only by seeing the difference that I realised my other corals were simply surviving in adverse conditions. And now I know the PAR in every corner of my tank, I don't need to put a frag into the tank and wonder if it will do OK there, flow allowing I know it has the right light level.
Its still fingers crossed on a few LPS but ladies and gent do not run without knowing your PAR and specifically if you are changing your lights make sure you get it rechecked because you will not see the issue until it is very much too late.
