sps and lighting period

Heller792 · Jul 7, 2012

just wondering how long you sps keepers would leave your main lights on. I did have mine for 11 hours but ive been lowering down to about 7 due to the sps getting lighter in colour. Does this sound about right to you?

Dave

Bluejawtrigger · Jul 7, 2012

I run mine full power for about 6hours. With half hour ramp up/down before and after. LEDs.

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Sahin · Jul 7, 2012

What type of lighting are you using? I've found that with T5 and LED that corals gets lighter with these type of lighting, on the other hand metal halide lights afford deeper colours even with longer lighting hours. If you have T5 or LED lighting run light no more than five hours at maximum power. You may run the actinic or supplemental lighting for up to 10 hours.

Ace25 · Jul 7, 2012

I like to simulate nature, so I run my LEDs similar to the sun with about 4 hours of "peak" time.

I loaned my PAR meter to a friend who ran solatubes and had it log for the day on June 20th. Since the meter doesn't take too many measurements the graph is a little rough, with some cloud cover happening right at mid day, but it was enough info to go off of in order to set ramp up and down times on my LED lights.

uriah · Jul 7, 2012

How is the growth rate for those only running 4-5 hours? I switched from 2 400w mh to 3 120w led on my 125g and running for about a 2 weeks now about 8 hours. everything looks okay and growth is still good.

uriah · Jul 7, 2012

I guess it also depends on what you are keeping. I have a 125g with about 20 different sps colonies...

Ace25 · Jul 7, 2012

Growth rate is the same as any other lighting I have used. One thing to remember with LEDs is that the "daylight" part is mostly for our eyes. It is the royal blue part that is providing most of the useful light for the corals, so even in the dusk/dawn settings were it is mostly royal blues running the corals are still getting a lot of the proper spectrum for growth.

My LED light schedule using PWM to control the LEDs:
12pm - 12x 420nm LEDs start to ramp up, reaching 700mA in 60minutes (1pm)
12:30pm - 12x royal blues start to ramp up, reaching 1000mA in 90 minutes (2pm)
1:30pm - 4x cool whites/4x regular blue/4x cyan start to ramp up - reaching 600mA in 120 minutes (3:30pm)
2:30pm - 6x cool whites/6x warm whites start to ramp up - reaching 600mA in 90 minutes (4pm)

From 4pm - 8pm the lights stay, then they begin their ramp down phase in reverse order. It is a 12 hour light cycle overall, with moonlights running a few hours before and after the main lights. I feel this gives me the perfect looking dusk/dawn setting with a very bright crisp mid day look with good coloring all around.

Heller792 · Jul 7, 2012

i currently have 2x250w halides with blv lamps in. One lamp is the 14k and the other is 16k as i wanted to try it. The unit also has 4 blue t5's in it which are on for about 4 hours per day.

Thanks for the replys, Dave