Sabella's 450L mixed reef build thread

HomeSlizzice · Feb 28, 2024

Your corals are always unreal! Amazing work.

By any chance do you know what your DLI is? Or roughly how much par on the top of the rocks vs the bottom and how long you run your photo periods for? Any ramp up/ramp down period? If so how long?

Sabellafella · Feb 28, 2024

HomeSlizzice said:
Your corals are always unreal! Amazing work.

By any chance do you know what your DLI is? Or roughly how much par on the top of the rocks vs the bottom and how long you run your photo periods for? Any ramp up/ramp down period? If so how long?

I've always ran my lights between 10 and 11 hours.

My peak normally covers about 5 6 hours of the day. My ramp up starts at 9 am to 1. Reef brites first, Blue plus, then full on starting at one.

Daylights go off at I believe 7 o'clock. Blue plus comes down to 830. And reef brite stays on till 945.

Par and coverage Is absolutely cranking. Anywhere that I can safely place a coral where it's getting direct light. Wether it's between two colonys on the top of the tank, or under 3 colonys on the bottom of the tank not shaded by growth, I can still achieve pretty decent growth and color especially in terms of radiation numbers.

Normally when you have a Bunch of colonys side by side like that light doesn't do much to illuminate the sides of the coral. Especially if the coral is lower down in the tank. The adjacent colonys kind of block the light from hitting the sides of other pieces. I angled my reef brights for that reason works very well. The ati t5 fixture throws our nearly double the par levels as the reefbrite t5s and the hybrid fixture.

In terms of par levels pretty straight forward. Most of my larger colonys are un around 400 450

Everything else including the brighter spots on the sandbed hits about 250 350.