The Viparspectra 300w is far too muchOk husband said I cant read it and he got between 1.026/27. The refractometor we have say ATC... It was off Amazon and what we could afford. All of our rock should be live rock, from when we first set up our tank back in 2017. We have 1"-1.5" of sand. It is a 37 gallon tank. We have a canister filter and 2 hang on the back filters. One of the back ones job is to draw the water in for the canister amd helps return it to the tank. We have 2 clown fish, a yellow tang, and a couple hermit crabs. There was a star fish but it was tiny and we dont know if its still there... We were testing once a month but now doing 1x a wk. We try to do a 5g water change a week. We vacuum the sand as well. My poor torch literally melted away. It was about half there, I target fed it reef roids and 20 min later poof... It was 100% gone... 6m it was just happy and beautiful then bam dead....
for a 37 gallon tank... and I’m no lighting expert but depending on the type of material that you’re reflecting the light off of and the setting you have you light on, I’m thinking that is definitely a contributing factor.
I have two Viparspectra 150w on my 90 gallon tank placed side by side at 7” above water height. My whites are at 4 and my blues are at 15 and I’m still getting over 300 par at mid tank level. They’re cheap but very powerful LEDs.