Par Measurements Overrated? Should you really care?

[stephen wyard]

I would love to know but here you can't rent one and to buy is out of the question.I think its a good starting point if you know.

 

[Stigigemla]

I think it is good to estimate the PAR if You are starting a tank.
A good thing with the PAR measurements is that nobody is talking about lumens anymore.
But if You have had Your tank going for a few Years You know how a coral looks like if it needs more light.
And if You suspect it gets too much light its always possible to test more circulation at it.
The corals tell You more than a PAR meter when You have began to learn from them.

 

[Brew12]

Quick comment on using your eyes for judging PAR. Human's are terrible at it. If you light a tank brightly with white lighting it can be low PAR. A very high PAR tank lit primarily with blue LED's can look dim.
If you run everything at 100% this doesn't matter too much. But, let's say you run a tank with mostly white lighting but you want to run more blue to highlight certain acro's. You could do this by raising the blue lights, but you would be dramatically increasing PAR. What you will likely find is that you need to lower your white lights quite a bit and lower your blue lights only a little to change the color but maintain a constant PAR. The tank will appear darker to your eye at the same PAR level. A PAR meter would be a huge help making an adjustment like this.

 

[JCOLE]

I think they are usual for all lighting types. LED's are adjustable and you would want to know your PAR if making any adjustments. With MH and T5's it is very helpful to let you know when the bulbs need to be changed.

For example. I run (4) Modified black box lights on my 150 gallon tank and have been concerned why I am getting very small growth from my pieces. I picked up a Seneye PAR meter and if these readings are correct then this could explain why. I was getting 1500+ PAR at the top of my rocks. I believe photoinhibition was causing my corals to shutdown. I used the PAR meter to adjust my lights down to a level around 700 at the tops and 300 near the bottom.

 

[SkiCatTX]

I have an SQ-520 that I've been using to set up my new tank. Mostly I have been interested over the years and finally decided to get one and start monitoring. I made a map of my tank with each light change.

The tank is just into the ugly stage, so just has a few LPS for now.

I only have 2x XR-15s and 4x T5s, but I'll be adding more soon. With these maps, I hope to be better able to place SPS over time, based on where they were in their original tanks.

 

[adobo]

Do you ever feel like lighting par ratings are overrated? I'm not talking about a light manufacturer over promising here. I'm talking about us, as hobbyists, putting too much effort and value into the par levels over our beloved corals.

PAR in relation to aquariums is the amount of light that penetrates the water column and is available for corals to use in photosynthesis.

I'm not trying to stir controversy here but I feel like we spend so much effort getting that LED, or whatever light it is, at just the precise "spot" so the par reading is exactly where we want it. I remember back in the day we didn't measure that stuff. We purchased lights and hung them over the tank, and they worked! I had beautiful corals and I never knew what the PAR was at all. If the corals stretched we moved the light a little closer. If they retracted we moved the light a little further away. Or we moved the coral!

I may be off my rocker here today so either somebody put me back on it or agree with me. I'm also not knocking knowing what your PAR levels are as I have tracked mine as well.


Do you think that knowing the lighting PAR over your tank is overrated or not?

Do you know what your PAR levels are?


@ESH PAR levels on his reef

Back in the day, what were our choices? PCs, VHOs and halides. Of course, you could mix and match to get different effects, right? Were any of those solutions dimmable? Did the off the shelf solutions come with recommendations as to how high off the water you should mount the lights? Did bulb manufacturers give recommendations for how and when to use 75w vs 150w vs 250w vs 400w halide bulbs? Did they tell you why a 400w halide bulb was worth the extra expense?

Humans are constantly overestimating their ability to measure something with their senses. Yet humans prove time and again that their senses are extremely poor instruments. Yes, it is bright. Is it too bright or not bright enough? Ask 3 different people and you will get 7 different answers.

I don't myself ever have a desire to have a map of par levels as shown in that image, but I do intend to find out what the par levels are at the bottom of my tank (on average), in the middle and on the top. It's not have exact numbers but just to get a sense, is 20% output of my lights sufficient, too much or too little for the inhabitants I keep in the tank.

By the way, I always get a kick at reading posts about how great things used to be. Live rock, metal halides, etc. Everything was just so easy back in the day. Just throw the stuff on and everything works. Here is my 2 cents. Uh. no. Things were not easy back in the day. Things are buttload easier today. A buttload. That is even factoring in the so called "prolonged ugly" stage.

Back in the day, they didn't have a plethora of quality equipment at affordable prices. Back in the day, you wanted good skimmer, you bought a deltec (costs an arm and a leg). Or an MRC. Or an ETS (who knew that the reef devil actually sucked.). Back in the day, nobody knew if PCs were enough or if you needed to have halides. And what wattage of halides. Back in the day, refractometers were not common - they had those plastic hydrometers. And coralife salt was all you could find in the fish stores. (That's not a judgement on Coralife salt. ). And back in the day, there were no youtube videos explaining how to do everything. No BRS tv, no Reef Builder, no Tidal Gardens. Heck, back in the day, there was no Reef2Reef. There was even a time where there was no Reef Central.

So I know all that is a tangent. Its just I find it amusing to hear how great things used to be.

 

[Shawn_epicurious]

Just like any other technology, understanding and usage should make life easier for the reefer to be successful. Measuring PAR today, might have solved problems you had “back in the day” that you would not even have known you had

 

[JLynn]

Except for in the few situations where you have specific PAR numbers you know you need to hit, I don’t think they are by any means necessary. But they certainly are useful. They help you compare lights, and if you map out the PAR levels all over your aquascape, it’s much easier to figure out coral placement. You know where all the highest and lowest spots of PAR are, etc.

 

[lavoisier]

I have MH, T5s, and LEDs on my tank. (I love my MHs ). I have used a PAR meter to set up my last two tanks and I use it every 6 months or so to "check" on my bulbs. I like to keep them for a year but sometimes I need to change them out sooner. I do not think a meter is essential. Looking at my corals tells me when things are going well and when something needs tweeking. The meter lets me know if there might be an issue with lighting or not.

 

[Ef4life]

I think knowing par is important, mostly for building a knowledge Base of what corals do what at certain ranges, or helping out other hobbyists with coral placement etc.

But it’s not necessary to know par to have a thriving successful reef tank. And par measurements don’t really take into account the lights spectrum so a coral under 200par in tank A might react differently under 200par from a different light source/spectrum in tank B

 

[mike550]

Before I started to add corals I rented a PAR meter to get a sense of light intensity. I was very surprised at how "low" my levels were since to my own eyes, things seems well lit. So I've adjusted my lighting, and have a sense of my PAR at the sand bed and at various points / levels in my tank.

That said, so even if my scape changes, I still have a sense of my PAR levels. It also makes me think more about whether or not I should purchase stronger LED lights as I think about what corals I would like to add and where I would like to place them.

 

[Vette67]

What's PAR? I don't know what it is in my tank, and haven't needed to know in over 20 years. And even if I did know it, there's very little I could do about it. My SPS grow like weeds, and my derasa has grown over an inch of new shell in the last 6 months. So knowing that number would change nothing for me. I would only measure it if I could borrow someone's PAR meter, and it would be strictly for curiosity. That's the beauty of Metal Halides. They just work.

 

[ReefHomieJon]

All I know is that I have a 120 gallon reef with only 3 messily A360xs over it mounted 8” above the water. Supposedly that’s not enough. But I put my acros up high pretty much directly under it. Montis a little lower and left or right of the light, and LPS and zoas toward the bottom. Everything is growing and colorful so I would like to know my par levels just to validate my coral placement but I must be doing something right with my limited knowledge. Or maybe it’s just that KESSIL LOGIC

 

[ichthyoid]

Knowing what PAR/PUR levels you have in a reef tank, based on depth/position & type(s) of corals you intend to keep, is important. This may be even more so for new or less experienced hobbyists.

Fwiw,
I’ve been in the hobby for 47 years & own 4 PAR meters. I use them for ‘tuning’ lights, especially in new systems/for new hobbyists. It’s one less thing to screw up, if you know what you have,

I love my microeinsteins!

 

[Buckster]

BRS did a review using the AI 26. My three lights are two 26's and one 32 installed 13" above the water and I have had some bleaching from coral frags placed in the sand. I recently placed them in the shade and waiting for improvement. It makes me wonder if I should rent a par meter to verify the video!

 

[shwareefer]

My DIY leds (Rapidled) were much brighter than I thought they were in my tank. Seneye was a great purchase for PAR (not really convinced of it's other features or their accuracy aside from temperature), and I will use it for every tank from now on.

 

[ReefLab]

I like to listen to the experts since I’ve only been reefing for a year. Dana riddle strongly recommends measuring par so I do!

I’d like to learn more about how sunrise/sunsets and led hybrid setups with varying par affect coral.

 

[alton]

What is a Par meter and is it a useful tool? When I used Metal Halide Lamps I found by checking my Par levels monthly my lamps where only dropping 10% in 16 months as an average. I did have one lamp last 24 months and one that only lasted 12 months. So I figured I saved myself a bunch of money by not changing lamps every 12 months as advertised. I found out on one of my Mars Aqua leds that I had to raise the power to 100% from 50% to keep up with the two other Mars Aqua fixtures after one year. When I bought my XR15 to get the Par I needed it only had to be set at 50% not 100%. Most claim your water has to be tested all the time, but yet too many think we guess with our lighting. Like Brew12 stated our eyes are a bad judge on light.

 

[Nhjmc]

Yes but it's a $500-$600 deposit to rent one.

 

[chaoticreefer]

I bought the MQ-510 par meter few years ago and I don't regret it for a second. I run Radions x15s, tried to run them by my eye at 70%-100%. Once I got the par meter I run them at 40% and coral shifted their gears to the better side of things. I do retest it every 3-4 months and things do change in that time period sometimes, whether it's water quality, rock movement, or etc.