T5 HYBRID
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"A photon is a photon or does the combo of technology really have advantage?"Your charts are obsessed with spectrum. It will pop and shimmer fine and coverage will suffer. Coverage will be hot spots and weak spots but common sense so you buy three off them and hopefully raise atleast 9" over tank, so they behave like t5s and back to start of thread. Yet leds premium brands still charge more!
5 thing to plug in and 2 ballasts and 3 dc drivers to all break. Hang around a bit. It always does. Now what did you really gain?
A photon is a photon or does the combo of technology really have advantage? I would say possible with the globox effect haludes give, and possibly not with the spotlight effect leds give. You can find disasterous results in archives of gen1 ecotechs.
They were fixed by advanced users sharing a spectrum, and well raising up and burning brighter. Hmmm
https://forums.reefcentral.com/threads/the-myth-of-mh-being-hotter-than-t5s.676284/page-2.T5 is a lot more complex to set up because it needs more bulbs, more ballasts, more individual reflectors. People need to stop giving advise that T5 is latest and greatest. It's not!
There's no reason why T5s would make for pale colors by themselves, other than there could also be some mild bleaching due to the uniform light, rather than a spot lighting dispertion from the MH.
You are assuming the sps color is a sole function of lighting - this is not true at all. There could be a couple explanations, one of which I mentioned in a previous post - N limitation. The second is that it could be light adaptation. With multiple T5s, you really can put a lot of different lamps with different spectrums that could cause some mild bleaching. Also T5 lighting is pretty uniform versus metal halide which are more spot lights...
Funny huh ..Halides vs. T5's, here we go again, I am so over it when it relates to this hobby.
To bring it up to the present just substitute "led" in many different responses..My person opinion is that due to the very, very patchy/peaky nature of a T5 's spectrum we are giving a rather unnatural light to the coral and they are coloring up differently due to that.
But that proves my point too. If a coral sits to the right of a halide it is primarily getting lit on the left side. So if you measure the par on the left side is very high with halide but if you measure the right it is much lower. Same thing if it is in front or behind the halide. Now with t-5 you can take any point around that coral and it will be equal.
I have preference lately for just running t5s. I have halides only over a frag tank. They are radiums as that is what you can get easily.
My suspect that it is less important that most think. Sps might encrust in a month and take off in 7 months. Changing lights source seems to delay this success.
I sadly just buy online as last good reef store is gone here. There are some 90 min away but too far to kill a weekend.
Wwc has great healthy stuff grown under ecotechs. I would need to move tank to raise them up high like they do. It is just painful to spend 4k whereas 200 on 8 bulbs is no big deal if everything is paid for.
I have run t5s 2 years. I assure you the colors and pop fade. Replacing 2 year old t5s is big improvement in colors. It takes 20 whole minutes.
I also install a fan to increase evaporation and dose with avast kalk stirrer at night. I turn off osmolator at night too. It is cheap and works great.
I could move tank and spend 4k to be up to date. Should I or go to Mauii instead?
I have been thinking lately about the fact that when you have an old stock of a product you will desperately try to sell it! Right?! I agree with the skepticism on any info from that person or company when anyone tries to do that. Even Tullio! Could that be the reason why he tries to publish so many advantages in using metal halides over LEDs? Would that be his main reason to spend so much time in so many videos doing that? Let's assume it is indeed!!! I'm not being sarcastic here! I'm straight to the point as I see what some have tried to impose that here couple of times in the past. Not as a malicious action, but as a professional move. That still don't cancel all the adjectives and all the advantages metal halides offer over ANY other technology in terms of the actual light. The way light is produced, emitted and distributed.I think part of the issue with replacement schedules lies in the reason we replace bulbs or panels. In many cases, t5 bulbs will be functioning properly at full intensity, and as they age, the spectral shift and intensity drop can be significant enough to drop beyond an ideal threshold of par or color balance. Similarly so with halide bulbs. They can lose the majority of their blue content. Do they still work? Absolutely! One of the most impressive growing sps tanks I’ve seen was using 5+ year old oddysea brand halide bulbs and t5 tubes. He never changed them from the day he got the fixture because “they were still super bright”. Granted those 20,000k bulbs and blue t5’s looked closer to 6500k-10000k by the time that tank came down. The growth remained explosive.
The led replacement schedule can be for a couple reasons. Either the hobbyist is bored, which I imagine is the most common, and silliest reason. But it happens. A dead fixture entirely, OR because of diode degradation.
Degradation is what “professionals” (salesmen) recommend to be a 5 year threshold. But if the product is being run at a reduced intensity, and still works as designed, and still provides adequate intensity levels, why on earth would someone replace them? Because Tullio says so? That doesn’t work for me. I hesitate to take the advice too closely of someone who’s very livelihood depends on me continuing to purchase their products on a regular schedule. It doesn’t make them all liars and thieves, but it does put a distinct asterisk on their advice. And that is ok. There is still great information to be had. It just takes critical thinking to interpret it and apply it to each of our individual experiences