No love for MH?

[SMSREEF]

No contradiction.. It's a morphological difference.
Same w/ terrestrial plants. you can grow very healthy thin stemmed plants indoors (light differences, little wind).
Just can't hit them w/ tornadic winds..

Outside wind and spectrum "harden" the stems (thicker)..
Point is it isn't "health" just form..
Now where it would matter is if you are trying to repopulate nature..

This I can totally understand. My corals grown under LED would never make it in the ocean.

This thread is really interesting... I definitely have an open mind when I set up a new tank.

I’m gonna do a 24x24 cube so it would be really easy to use a single halide and I love the look of halide tanks... I’m just scared to death of the heat because I live in Miami.

 

[DogsRule]

No contradiction.. It's a morphological difference.
Same w/ terrestrial plants. you can grow very healthy thin stemmed plants indoors (light differences, little wind).
Just can't hit them w/ tornadic winds..

Outside wind and spectrum "harden" the stems (thicker)..
Point is it isn't "health" just form..
Now where it would matter is if you are trying to repopulate nature..

Great comparison. I've always used the thin stemmed "leggy" seedlings last when planting my veggie gardens- not because I think they are unhealthy, but I think they've already used considerable energy to reach for the light & so may take time to catch up to the stockier "normal" transplants. Same with FW planted tanks, if the plants are leggy, it is usually a sign of not enough light for that particular plant.
I know LEDs are capable of growing corals- never argued it, I just prefer my old school lights. I now wonder if the "thin" coral growth you observed in the study (& I personally noticed when using LEDs ) is an effort to create more surface area to capture more useable light? Plants & animals don't like to expend energy if they don't have too (I think we are the only Species that does- particularly when related to Reef tank lighting topics )
I've not read your study, but I now plan too & wondering if you saw more growing tips/branching in the LED specimens, in order to increase surface area. All the best

 

[DogsRule]

This I can totally understand. My corals grown under LED would never make it in the ocean.

This thread is really interesting... I definitely have an open mind when I set up a new tank.

I’m gonna do a 24x24 cube so it would be really easy to use a single halide and I love the look of halide tanks... I’m just scared to death of the heat because I live in Miami.

Plenty of ways to mitigate the heat from a single MH bulb- especially in Miami, as you'll be running the house AC more than say me in Central Florida. Also bulb height, wattage, cooling fan & surface agitation will help for starters. HTH

 

[SMSREEF]

Plenty of ways to mitigate the heat from a single MH bulb- especially in Miami, as you'll be running the house AC more than say me in Central Florida. Also bulb height, wattage, cooling fan & surface agitation will help for starters. HTH

Thank you,
Yes, AC is on all the time. I’m gonna check into halide a little more. I’ll start a thread when I get ready to make some decisions.

 

[TheGreatWave]

This is why we can't use plant analogies, because most plant analogies are completely wrong to begin with. Hear me out.

There are only 5 problems in a garden that causes all the sick thin crappy plants.

-Too much light
-Too much water
-Too many nutrients
-Bugs
-Not enough magnesium in a healthy garden.

That is it. All of these little observations and speculations are all derived from one of the above problems.

Example: A magnesium deficiency is manifested in many ways.
A magnesium ion is the central ion in a chlorophyll molecule.

So if we "too much water" we rot the fine root hairs away so that the plant can only absorb water. The first thing it runs out of is Magnesium, followed by a variety of other nutrients.
If we "too many nutrients" the plant can't pull water from the soil anymore, which is why the leaf tips burn first, they are furthest from the roots and hardest to pump water to. Nutrients are all SALTS. What happens when we salt the earth?
If we "too much light" we stunt the growth of the plant by illuminating auxins on the dark side. Too bright of light. Yellowing starts to form at intervenial locations because there is a physical limit to how fast a plant can produce chlorophyll from magnesium.
"Bugs" can only attack sick plants. If your plants weren't over watered, over fed and to much light you wouldn't have a bug problem. If bugs could attack a healthy plant the rain forest would be gone.
"Not enough magnesium in a healthy garden." Add more mag, because magnesium is the central ion in a chlorophyll molecule, it is the first thing the healthy plant runs out of.

I can tell you exactly what you did wrong with your garden two weeks ago and what it will look like 2 weeks from now.

So when we can sum up 90% of growing problems with the above paragraphs, how silly do you think it looks to someone like me when folks speculate and obsess over things that don't matter. There is no mention of type of light, brand of nutrients, what kind of soil. Hydro vs soil vs coco It just doesn't matter. A good grower can use all the equipment. You don't have to know how to grow the plant, you have to learn how to use the equipment.

Light+water+co2=sugar and oxygen. That is all that matters in the photosynthesis equation. The only thing you can add in this situation is co2, or another light and garden. Co2 is good for another 25% but only if the garden is healthy.

Saying one brand of nutrient is better then another when neither effect yield is silly. Light = yield. Especially if you haven't performed 3 identical grows as a baseline before you switch. Randomly switching nutrients results in 3 scenarios, things get better, stay the same or get worse. So if nutrients are good for less then 1% of total yield to begin with, why does the brand matter? Why obsess over the 66% chance of making that 1% worse. It's ridiculous. You can out-veg someone with a flower bulb- you can out flower someone with a veg bulb by observing the above rules. Spectrum doesn't even matter, ya I said it. I promise you have never read more a more succinct all-encompassing gardening advice then what you have just read.

A wise man once said "LEDs are the number one way to fail". It's not that LED don't grow, they work excellent, it's that people don't know how to use them. LEDs don't cause shadowing, using small point sourced light causes shadowing. T5 don't provide a soft blanket of light, using linear tubes of light the length of the tank does this. MH bulbs don't fill tanks, reflectors do. There isn't a person alive that can look at a HEALTHY plant and know what kind of light was used. You may be able to look at the way the plant was shaped as an indication if it was indoor or outdoor, but you will never guess the type of light. Add to the fact that indoor flowers are worth a lot more then outdoor flowers, why is it again you want to change the light to be more like the sun?

So perhaps you can see why some might be wildly skeptical or stubbornly dissatisfied with a lot of the information that gets pushed.

LED don't need to heat to make light and are therefor a little more efficient, but you still need around the same wattage as the other technologies. In fact you may need more fixtures to get enough flood light. That is really the only thing to be concerned with. 800watt of LED is about the same as 1000watt of T5 or MH. LED is ultimate point source, T5 is the ultimate pseudo collimated source and a MH pendant and reflector is a hybrid of both.

MH=cheap and easy, hot and poor color selection
T5=good all-arounder, affordable and decent color selection. Kinda big, not as cool as LED, not as hot as MH.
LED=Narrow band popping custom colors, runs coolest. Expensive and poor light distribution due to relatively small common fixtures. *LED formats are constantly changing, gardening has moved on to medium powered diodes on big panels.

For the record, I honestly don't care what anyone grows with. I'm just saying, I could pick apart these proclamations all day, just as I could argue with a guy who puts Mylar on the walls of his garden when a good grower grows in the middle of the room. You can get the same yield with a Sodium or a MH if you don't over water. You can get the same yield in coco vs soil if you don't feed too much. I'm not interested in your anecdotal advice if you aren't getting the yield your supposed for the amount of light you had. Don't tell me "organic" nutrients when they are the same nutrients. I can make any nutrient "organic" by dosing microbes. People don't even understand what organic means lol but will pay more and tell you its better. (A microbe acts as an intermediary that allows the plant to absorb a nutrient while expending less energy.)

Lets just throw this out there, I think we would all assume a thicker coral is better, but is it? Is a denser coral a "better coral"? One could also say a fragile coral will propagate in the wild faster. The biggest elephant in the room is flow.
Watch that Macna video with Vincint Chalias where he discusses two different types of SPS coral that turned out to be the same coral, the only thing different was the flow. Same reef, same LIGHT, different flow=unrecognizable coral. How are you guys going to rectify this?

 

[oreo54]

Terrestrial plant respond to wind to develop tissue..
look I'm not crazy about my own analogy except to point out thinner is not necessarily less healthy..

The goal of hardening off is to cause plant cell walls to thicken, changing soft, succulent growth to firmer, harder tissue. Hardening off causes the following changes in plant growth and development.

• Plant growth slows.
• Natural waxes on leaf surfaces thicken as plants are exposed to more sun, reducing the rate of water loss.
• Cell walls develop more lignin to strengthen them.
• The amount of freeze-prone water in plant cells is reduced.
• The amount of carbohydrates (stored food reserves) in plant tissues increases.
• More rapid root development is stimulated.

See the "issue" I had was the statement..
"found that corals were thinner" and by inference "lesser", without any real proof...
Who cares if they are thinner if it doesn't impact growth and health...

There are only 5 problems in a garden that causes all the sick thin crappy plants.

Even you are guilty of it sort of..

Is a denser coral a "better coral"?

Awaiting a real answer..

 

[TheGreatWave]

To elaborate, you can take a houseplant, give it too much light and end up with a miniaturized plant with small leaves and short inter-nodal spacing.
-Is it "Dense"? Apparently.
-Is it a strong healthy specimen? Absolutely not.

 

[SMSREEF]

To elaborate, you can take a houseplant, give it too much light and end up with a miniaturized plant with small leaves and short inter-nodal spacing.
-Is it "Dense"? Apparently.
-Is it a strong healthy specimen? Absolutely not.

I have never had that happen. Spindly always happened from not enough light. I grew tropicals in Michigan and barely got them through the winter under grow lights... In the spring they all got the spindly branches cut off and they bushed up nicely under the sun.
Thank goodness I’m in Miami now, lol

 

[DogsRule]

"Bugs" can only attack sick plants. If your plants weren't over watered, over fed and to much light you wouldn't have a bug problem. If bugs could attack a healthy plant the rain forest would be gone.

The Rainforest is an eco-system & in harmony with plant/prey/ predator species- unless we upset that harmony

 

[TheGreatWave]

Actually I meant that too much light can cause a subjectively dense plant, if you didn't have anything to compare it to. If you give this same plant the less and appropriate amount of light, you would have about 20 times the mass at the end.

It sounds like you did run out of light, winter is a long time and most plants grow at a rate of 50watt per week, so you need 1000watt for every 25square feet to keep a plant growing healthy for 4-5 months.

A 1000watt light needs to be about 4 feet away from the plant at the end of grow, which is why so many people kill plants with LED, because the manufacturer says to hang it at 18". If a 1000w MH radiates light in all direction and the LED focuses it all downward and is more efficient, how can you justify putting the light closer?

You also have to increase the light as you grow. If the 1000w is your finishing light, then you veg the plant with half the power.

Most plants are going to need 600watt as an absolute minimum to get through 3-5 months. This is only good for a 3x3 area.

A 1000watt is also only capable of growing a canopy 24" deep, so if you are literally trying to grow trees indoors, well that is going to be a challenge.

Hopefully you can use this to see why it didn't work for you. If it was a spare bedroom full of plants with some T5 strewn around, I totally believe you ran out of light.

Enjoy Miami.

 

[TheGreatWave]

The Rainforest is an eco-system & in harmony with plant/prey/ predator species- unless we upset that harmony

That's right. So if you go and pour a bunch of Advanced Nutrients around, you will burn the plants and the bugs will eat it. If you over-water the rain forest, bugs will eat it. If you remove some of the canopy over-illuminating the younger, lower plants, bugs will eat them.

If your indoor garden is healthy, it is extremely unlikely you are ever going to have a bug problem, short of some type of invasive species that attacks your plant in particular.
It's just like people who chase pH swings, or pH their water, talkin about "nutrient lockout" etc. Have you every seen anyone pH the water from their garden hose? Do you see how many plants are outside thriving in a deluge of different pH water? 5-7 is fine lol.

 

[TheGreatWave]

Duplicate

 

[DogsRule]

That's right. So if you go and pour a bunch of Advanced Nutrients around, you will burn the plants and the bugs will eat it. If you over-water the rain forest, bugs will eat it. If you remove some of the canopy over-illuminating the lower plants, bugs will eat them.

If your indoor garden is healthy, it is extremely unlikely you are ever going to have a bug problem, short of some type of invasive species that attacks your plant in particular.
It's just like people who chase pH swings, or pH their water, talkin about "nutrient lockout" etc. Have you every seen anyone pH the water from their garden hose? Do you see how many plants are outside thriving in a deluge of different pH water? 5-7 is fine lol.

Wow, this has gone way off topic, but you are missing my point. Bugs will attack & eat healthy plants ! No different to how certain species evolved to eat healthy coral. I spent a few months in Borneo years ago for jungle warfare training. We would patrol past lines of leafcutter ants moving huge amounts of leaves. Caterpillars, the size of fingers eating leaves in seconds & so on. All these bugs were kept in check by animals higher in the food chain & so on & so on- nothing to do with excess X or lack of Y, as it was all pristine jungle (apart from us guys trying not to leave any sign we'd been there)

 

[TheGreatWave]

Wow, this has gone way off topic, but you are missing my point. Bugs will attack & eat healthy plants ! No different to how certain species evolved to eat healthy coral. I spent a few months in Borneo years ago for jungle warfare training. We would patrol past lines of leafcutter ants moving huge amounts of leaves. Caterpillars, the size of fingers eating leaves in seconds & so on. All these bugs were kept in check by animals higher in the food chain & so on & so on- nothing to do with excess X or lack of Y, as it was all pristine jungle (apart from us guys trying not to leave any sign we'd been there)

It's not off topic, it's an analogy that has more to do with growing coral then it doesn't. It is about adjusting human behavior. You have completely missed the point.

All of it has to do with the amount of X, the whole rain forest lives off light if you really want to get off into the weeds. The rain forest is X size, gets X amount of light per day per year to grow X amount of biomass. If you double the amount of rain the rain forest sees as a chronic situation, you will kill it. It doesn't have anything to do with caterpilars leafcutters.

Your fish tank or an indoor houseplant is hardly the same thing is it? Do you think because you have a couple of pods drifting around in your tank you have a "real" reef?

 

[oreo54]

SADLY.. No MH's used..

 

[alton]

This thread is covering a lot of things these days? Most plants today are genetically grown and why farmers no longer uses pesticides. And why I am now seeing tree lizards, have multiple other lizards in my yard today which starting happening when my wifes family stopped spraying many years ago.
After 48 pages I don't remember seeing someone post they switched from MH to leds and their corals growth increased over what they saw using MH? If there is that person please post here. And please watt for watt Leds put out plenty of heat, they just use less watts, so less heat than a MH.

 

[TheGreatWave]

This thread is covering a lot of things these days? Most plants today are genetically grown and why farmers no longer uses pesticides. And why I am now seeing tree lizards, have multiple other lizards in my yard today which starting happening when my wifes family stopped spraying many years ago.
After 48 pages I don't remember seeing someone post they switched from MH to leds and their corals growth increased over what they saw using MH? If there is that person please post here. And please watt for watt Leds put out plenty of heat, they just use less watts, so less heat than a MH.

We were talking about a intentionally nondescript house plant as a parallel to describing coral density, not lizards outside or pest control from 50 years ago. You are within that eco-system and just a small part of it.

Growth would not increase with LED if you are using the same output wattage in the same fashion. (Easier said then done, nonetheless) The thread was not called "switched to LED and got more growth"?

Using heat for an LED is a straw man argument, they aren't nearly as hot as a MH. If hot MH is not a problem for you, why to you do want to believe LED are so hot?

The comment was made that LEDs don't have "heaters" in them like T5 and MH bulbs do, you are free to interpret the information and apply it as it suits you. I don't care what you use for your aquarium.
The lack of "heaters" is what gives LED a bit of an edge on efficiency.

All light is heat, so if you want to say LED produce more LIGHT/HEAT output per 1000watt, that would be accurate.
To get the same 1000w light output with T5 or MH, you are going to drawing say 1200 watts from the wall. That 200watt difference is pure heat and significant. It's wasted energy dissipated at the bulb, never converted to light most of it heating the room.

With a LED photons are released from electrons changing orbit around the nucleus of an atom. There is no heater, this is a fact not opinion.
Any heat generated at the diode is due to light being absorbed into the diode it's self, just as your car heats up when the sunlight hits the windows and gets converted to heat. Because all light is heat.
If you had theoretical perfect materials that had 100% reflection or 100% transparent lenses there wouldn't be any heat to speak of. Just like if you take the windows out of your car it would be cooler.

If touch the diffuser surface of a XR-15 LED running @ 50watt it's very warm, some would say uncomfortably hot.
I wouldn't recommend touching a the lens on a 50MH bulb as that would result in a burn.
With T5 bulbs the heaters are less intense and spread out on both ends of as many bulbs as you have in your fixture. That is why 1000w of T5 is a friendlier fixture then 1000W of MH. IMO. (The heaters in T5 directly effect PAR output which is why ATI cools their fixtures)

In the context of the thread, "would i MH it again?" Yes.
I've just replaced a MH for LED on a small tank, not because I didn't like the MH, the MH was too much wattage, I just needed less light for that particular tank. Led is nicer to work with and install.

If I was building a large system of tanks that needed affordable and easy lighting I would be using MH. You can't buy 1000watt of LED for $250 You can't buy 1000w of T5 for $250 either, just the bulbs would cost more.
I would probably use as big of bulbs as possible, assuming that one large heater in the 1000w is better then 4 separate heaters in 4 250w lights. (I'm speculating on that, though the inefficiency of 4 ballasts would probably be worse then one large ballast) Sure it's going to make a bit of heat, electric heat is expensive but being in Canada it's not actually "wasted" for most of the year. So the answer is yes, I would use MH again and whole heartily recommend it. I certainly wouldn't want to purchase 10,000w of LED fixtures, ouch. I would consider building them though if I can source the bare diode panels that had appropriate reef colors. Even still I'm sure the MH is still the most practical choice.

On a small tank LED. On a medium size tank LED/T5 hybrid. On a large tank T5/LED possibly MH with LED. LED gets to at least play a role in all scenarios because we like to that narrow band florescence that makes coral pop. When used with another light source it is not doing the heavy lifting, just a visual thing.

 

[alton]

I tested a 12" RGB LED strip once that only had a 1/2" diffuser and drew 19 watts from the wall. The temperature was 140 degrees with only 19 watts spread out 12". LEDs have to be cooled to stay efficient but that heat is still extended to the room. The day they build an led that can handle heat is the day we can use them to heat our homes and move away from radiant electric heaters. When I switched I went from 750 watts of MH to 400 watts of led. My corals didn't suffer, but at the same time that did not grow any better, nor did I see savings on my electric bill because I have to run the leds longer than I ran my MH each day in the summer. And you are right for smaller tanks led is the way to go.

 

[taricha]

SADLY.. No MH's used..

Paper source?

 

[oreo54]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4149485/

another fun one..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17679722