Daniel@R2R
Living the Reef Life
View BadgesStaff member
Super Moderator
Reef Squad
Partner Member 2024
Excellence Award
Photo of the Month
Article Contributor
Hospitality Award
Article Administrator
Reef Pumpkin Carver
R2R Secret Santa 2023
My Tank Thread
I had mimicked the photoperiod over an actual reef. They were on from 7 AM to 10:30 PM. Here's the post where I described the change:how long were your lights on before?
I'm playing with my light schedule a little...we'll call it an experiment...
Here's the schedule I've been running:
However, I got to wondering what a typical day schedule is on the reef, so after looking at several charts like this one:
I decided to extend my daylight period as well as my ramping times. My schedule isn't intended to be an EXACT replica of this one (particularly since my viewing time is not on the same schedule as the reef), but I think the time allotments are fairly close... Here's what I'll be running and watching to see how it impacts (or doesn't impact) my reef.
In the above, the light period is 7 AM to 10:30 PM (same timeframe as 4:30 AM to 8 PM in the above natural reef chart). It's blues only to the first point (8:30 AM) and from the last point (9:00 PM) with ramp up from blues only to about 18.5k (the spectrum of the SPS AB+ formula by EcoTech) which runs from 9:30 AM to 8 PM as my peak lighting.
Feel free to poke holes or throw darts or tomatoes (I prefer tomatoes...they're softer).