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Before LEDs, did we have this conversation?
Any theories on the root cause?
Get/borrow a used MH reflector and shine your kessil up into it and turn the power up 5% to handle the drop. This has terrible aesthetic, but you will be amazed at how many different parts of your coral get hit. If we put a LumenMax Elite, for example, over a Kessil tank, there are lines of demarcation on every coral that look different instantly - like somebody drew on them with a marker where the light-line was.
If this thread is still active the next time that I got to one of the local shops, I will take some photos of a 180G lit with 3 kessils. They have mostly MBP&S that are in the 12 to 16 inch range and every single one of them is dead on the bottom. They really love to sell the Kessils and their typical line is that the death is perfectly normal.
Don't underestimate that larger colonies make light even less available in the middle than smaller ones. Personally, I think that you will have a different opinion of this when you have 6 to 8 inch colonies with hundreds of branches.
When questions like these arise, I like to look to the wild for answers.
Those are real, substantial colonies where you start to see problems.
Do people discount the really solid hobbyists with a wide enough breath and depth of experience to know the difference and how to run a tank that unequivocally experience this only with LEDs and have since added T5s or gone back to what they had before? Anybody can find a post about anything, but when decade-long excellent hobbyists post about shadows of LED light being a problem (Joshi, Plaetta, etc.) ,we ignore that and choose what we want to choose and blame other things like flow? These folks know how to adequately flow their corals. There is an actual common denominator here and it is not all that hard to see.
Those are real, substantial colonies where you start to see problems.
Do people discount the really solid hobbyists with a wide enough breath and depth of experience to know the difference and how to run a tank that unequivocally experience this only with LEDs and have since added T5s or gone back to what they had before? Anybody can find a post about anything, but when decade-long excellent hobbyists post about shadows of LED light being a problem (Joshi, Plaetta, etc.) ,we ignore that and choose what we want to choose and blame other things like flow? These folks know how to adequately flow their corals. There is an actual common denominator here and it is not all that hard to see.
He replaced each MH with 3.33 Radions to help with the shading, yet still has issues. Did you forget, or just not know, that he lost all kinds of colonies when he first switched - lots of large, dense stuff and all of the Millepora. He indicated in his MACNA 2015 talk that he knew that this was an issue from day one and started with eight, but now has ten units. He has been very honest and open about his experiences yet people still seem to only see what they want to see: he will flat out tell you that there is no power savings and also that they do not cover as well and you need a lot of units to avoid some shadows (but he still has them).
There are examples on this thread, and you have seen some that you mentioned in your original post. It might be smart to not discount them and have a plan... rebuilding colonies once they start to go is not easy and you sometimes feel like you wasted all that time growing them in the first place. One day, folks discount the issue and then soon after they have corals that look like those in post #51.
I am only trying to help. If your thread title is a statement and not a question, then I will bow out since I don't believe it to be true and have nothing to further the conversation of shading being empirically BS.
Do people discount the really solid hobbyists...
I have shading with 5 Kessils on my 92g, but its only in areas that are well overgrown with corals. I dont think a t5 or mh would lite those areas either.