Anyone still prefer the 10K look, or even 6.5K? What's with all the windex colored tanks?
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it pales in comparison to sandbed depth and or access threads. A distant third to quarantine/ no qt threads
its handy to see what happens when a bunch of folks streamline a given method, reveals interesting details to some. I myself would prefer a less blue look but it won’t work for my system.
going off neils convictions I could readjust the entire nutrient balance for the system and be more justified, but its practical to just rotate the kessil dial towards electric blue and call it a decade or two.
here after this deep tank clean pico, we needed to tape off lights in order to reduce white light burn. And if we didn't, half his corals would have died. this was a tank rehab job, we always boost blues and cut whites for those jobs.
www.reef2reef.com
its handy to see what happens when a bunch of folks streamline a given method, reveals interesting details to some. I myself would prefer a less blue look but it won’t work for my system.
going off neils convictions I could readjust the entire nutrient balance for the system and be more justified, but its practical to just rotate the kessil dial towards electric blue and call it a decade or two.
here after this deep tank clean pico, we needed to tape off lights in order to reduce white light burn. And if we didn't, half his corals would have died. this was a tank rehab job, we always boost blues and cut whites for those jobs.
Nano Build - Jar of Rocks
Just looked it up thats a cool looking fish. Not for $100 beans though lol i am way to cheap for that. Would love to put a clown goby in there or a war paint. Maybe a blenny of some kind but my LFS hasnt really had anything of the nano/pico variety lately. Really dont think i can fit a hippo...
www.reef2reef.com
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fish farmer
2500 Club Member
I just swapped out a t5 coral plus for a blue plus
. Now I need to find more corals that actually pop under those lights.....most everything looks blue during my dawn/dusk.I'd like to share a conjecture of mine about the trend towards deep blue lighting and glowing corals. It's my thought that this has resulted in certain colors disappearing from LFS frag tanks, namely cyan corals. These corals don't really glow fun colors under 450nm and just kind of disappear in the blue. I haven't seen a cyan galaxea in years. Some basic brown, tan, and white corals (softies) are also harder to find. A very common cyan candy cane is now replaced by the bright green and a once common coral is much harder to find. It's not a major deal as all these weren't high demand even in the MH days, but it's a bit of a sad side effect.
Nice tank!! I start the morning in blue for and hour then the whites come on around 9 am I run them all until 5 pm then just the blues for 2 hours . I have a more natural sun light look for most of the day and the coral glow look for three hours.Before LED's became the preferred lighting solution, you had two camps of reefers. Folks that preferred the white(6.5K,10K) look with some blue actinic at dawn dusk, and those that were in the 20K camp. 20K was popular with SPS keepers. I was a daylight look reefer, and preferred the appearance that mimicked what I would see snorkeling a shallow reef.
I used to run Iwasaki's back in the day, and eventually graduated to Ushio metal halides. Then I went to T5's and still focused on a whiter look during the day.
Now I'm 100% LED, and I find I run my whites much higher than the settings shared by others. I've downloaded settings to my AI Hydras that others promote on forums/facebook out of curiousity, and they are all very blue in spectrum. I feel like I'm out of touch. Whenever folks post full tank shots, they look like windex or a blacklight poster from some kid's dorm room. I recognize LED tanks are harder to photograph true to color and I'm sure these tanks are not that blue in person. Hell, my white tank looks more blue in photos than in person.
I'd love to hear from folks that still crank up the white LED's on their systems. Let's see some shallow water reefs with nice sunshine glimmer lines. Here's mine, and yes it looks bluer due to the iphone camera(no filter), but it's around a 12K spectrum on the AI Hydras. I'm tempted to crank up the whites further and get more towards a 10K spectrum. Anyone have issues with the white LED's set to 100%?
I agree with what yo
u are saying but when the lfs is selling corals under blue lights for the wow effect and the brighter the glow the more expensive by the way, naturally people are going to want their tanks to look like the store. I run my tank more naturally, so I need the full range of light colors to maintain the biodiversity in my tank.
Yes Sr. !! there are critters that will eat cyano and diatoms in your tank called fighting conch. i have two in my tank they keep the deep sand bed clean well along with the rest of my clean up crew.I have a theory related to that. Back in the iwasaki days, nobody really ever talked about Dino's. They were rare. I think our tanks were more nutrient rich then for sure, but I also think our tanks were more hospitable to green algae. Dino's, like Diatoms, were a pioneer species eventually to be succeeded by turf algae. I feel like blue windex tanks with zero nitrates get in the way of that succession.
The only way I've ever managed turf algae is through herbivores. It's better to battle an algae that critters like to eat versus one nobody touches.
As far as my settings, I'll try to download them and upload the aip file. But my recommendation is to go into "manual" mode, set the blues and purple to 75% or more, then add in enough red/green/white till it looks good to you. Then have that be 8-9hrs and add some dawn dusk before and after. The dawn dusk periods can be the fun glow in the dark time... Similar to what we did with actinics.
I understand why it happens, I'm just sad that it is making some things less common
Clownfish_Boy
Well-Known Member
I like daylight (6500) augmented by 10k blues.
got a buddy with an outdoor koi pond...asked him how he kept the water so clear (as in not green)...said the secret was a uv sterilizer...so it stands to reason if uv kills algae running your lights on that end of the spectrum certainly wouldnt promote algae growth....personally i like the stuff to look like it does when snorkeling on a shallow reef...the flourescence is cool but it reminds me of a 70's dorm room or a strip club...hmmm...maybe i need a pole and a naked barbie in a mask and fins as tank decor....
Subsea
5000 Club Member
‘
Just did look at your build thread and kudos to your success and work ethic. Quite an extensive growout system you have.
With a 25 year mature tank, I seek stability in natural food webs to feed sea apples, flame scallops and sponges. To that end I run a high nutrient system with a 75G tank with cryptic plenum on top and 30G mud/algae refugium on bottom.
In my systems, algae is not the enemy, in fact, for me there are three legs to biofiltration:
algae, bacteria and sponges.
PS: I should add that zooanthelia in coral is algae.
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Thanks- I appreciate it. I just last week tore things down to move to my new place, slightly larger area to work with so will incorporate things I planned for originally but couldn’t implement. A cryptic sponge tank being one of them- just need to get time to anchor a platform to the wall so I can have it elevated above the sump. 4x 550lb rated concrete anchors over a 24” spacing should hold a 29g just fine.
I’ve followed many of your threads over the past few years and have enjoyed leaning about your successes. I’d be very happy if I could get a 10year tank with a fraction of your success.
I'm not strictly opposed to the whiter look, that's what my tank looked like when I started. However, I found that as I decreased whites and increased blues my corals were happier, grew faster, and had better color. As far as nature goes, sure shallow shallow reefs you snorkel will be quite white, but pretty quickly red light is scattered away.
Here's a completely unedited picture of some coral I took on a dive in the Red Sea, I can't remember the exact depth but probably around 20ish meters. It's almost comical how close Windex is to the actual reef.
Here's a completely unedited picture of some coral I took on a dive in the Red Sea, I can't remember the exact depth but probably around 20ish meters. It's almost comical how close Windex is to the actual reef.
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