Led help

[browndriver22]

Hey everyone so I bought a tank and have been trying to figure out the lighting. Dimensions are 96x36x16 inch shallow tank. I'm trying to only have one row of led lighting across the top. Do you think leds with 120 optics could cover the 36 inch width spread or do 90 optics and hang the lights higher. I'm thinking with a shallow tank I may be able to get away with it because I won't need as much light penetration for decent par. Any advice would help and thanks in advance.

 

[browndriver22]

Also it will be a mixed reef maybe some sps later on

 

[jda]

You are going to have a ton of shadows.

I would not used LED for a large tank like this (reflectors will be your friend), so I will bow out. The only advice that I will offer is that you look for and take advice from people who actually used panels over a tank this size and not folks with smaller tanks and cubes - they mean well and assume that their experiences will scale, but they do not. You will be finding that most successful folks will have a massive amount of panels on their larger tanks... and all of them have strong thoughts about where they are and what they would do differently.

FWIW - remember that spread drops PAR like crazy... moreso than penetration.

 

[browndriver22]

Thanks for input I have been reading about people using reflectors with tanks of this size. I will have to do more research about it.