Orphek or halide/t5 for sps tank?

pdxmonkeyboy

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Hey gang,
Wanted to throw this out there with a little info about my experience. I have a 300 gallon sps tank with a geiseman spectra and reef brites. All told about 1,000 watts of power. I am NOT worried about heat as I live in oregon and for 9 months out of the year my house sits at around 65 degrees. I have 1,100 watts of heater in that system so it's either heaters or halides... one of them is almost always running. I got fantastic growth and coloration.. so much that I typically dismissed LEDs. My settings are ON and OFF, which is fine for me. The Spectra casts an AMAZINGLY even cloud of par.

Flash forward.. buying a new house so of course I need a bigger tank. 8x4x30" in wall. I can build any light rack I want as I am handy. I thought 4 250 halides down the middle and then 2 rows of t5 on each side... a 4 foot wide tank does present challenges for lighting.

But I have been hearing great things about the orphek lights and I really like that they are a big panel as opposed to pucks. So now I an thinking 3 of the big V4 units and nothing else?

Anyone have experience with them for sps growth and coloration? My tank is 80% spa with some euphoria and clams for good measure. How is the disco ball effect?

Do they make corals pop like just reef brites do?

Thanks for any info!
 

Oldreefer44

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Lots of threads on them. Either one will work. Just a matter of preference. You will likely get many arguments on each side as people will want to validate what they have. As I see it the advantage to halide is the par. The advantage of going with Orphek is more control and the ability to adjust to what specific color spectrum you want as well as ramping up and down.
 

lexinverts

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Hey gang,
Wanted to throw this out there with a little info about my experience. I have a 300 gallon sps tank with a geiseman spectra and reef brites. All told about 1,000 watts of power. I am NOT worried about heat as I live in oregon and for 9 months out of the year my house sits at around 65 degrees. I have 1,100 watts of heater in that system so it's either heaters or halides... one of them is almost always running. I got fantastic growth and coloration.. so much that I typically dismissed LEDs. My settings are ON and OFF, which is fine for me. The Spectra casts an AMAZINGLY even cloud of par.

Flash forward.. buying a new house so of course I need a bigger tank. 8x4x30" in wall. I can build any light rack I want as I am handy. I thought 4 250 halides down the middle and then 2 rows of t5 on each side... a 4 foot wide tank does present challenges for lighting.

But I have been hearing great things about the orphek lights and I really like that they are a big panel as opposed to pucks. So now I an thinking 3 of the big V4 units and nothing else?

Anyone have experience with them for sps growth and coloration? My tank is 80% spa with some euphoria and clams for good measure. How is the disco ball effect?

Do they make corals pop like just reef brites do?

Thanks for any info!

You should try ReeFis, Brian. Have you seen them over the tank at Cuttlefishandcorals?

Edit: now I remember you were at the ReeFi demo, so you have seen them. Can’t get more power per $ than ReeFi Extremes.
 
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Mono

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Just curious, why don't you like pucks? They seem to be very popular.
 
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pdxmonkeyboy

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The pucks just dont make much sense to me. They are fine for small tanks but the par is just all over the place until you get pretty far down in the tank. Plus the shading that you get. For big tanks I just dont see them working that well unless you have $9,000 worth of them.

I think they are so "popular" simply because there are not many choices out there. That is just my opinion. The small size thing is simply physics.

Seems to me that the way to go is halides.
 

Mono

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Yeah, I see that. I guess people are filling them in with T5's. I run ATI T5's on two tanks but they are only 125g and I don't keep acros.
 
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pdxmonkeyboy

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You should try ReeFis, Brian. Have you seen them over the tank at Cuttlefishandcorals?

Edit: now I remember you were at the ReeFi demo, so you have seen them. Can’t get more power per $ than ReeFi Extremes.

I know.. locally made and all but jesus he won't give anyone a price break. High quality lights for sure. He told me today he would give me a good deal on 12....
 

DogsRule

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OP, I think your initial selection of 4 x 250 wt MH with either a row of T5 or LED (for dawn/ dusk ) supplement would be a great choice. I've lit a 4ft long tank with a single 250 MH bulb before, so I don't think the 4 ft width is an issue for your tank. Really just a matter of reflector &/or bulb height to get the coverage you need. You have to factor in that multiple bulbs can really bump the light coverage on a larger tank ,as you'll get overlap from the other bulbs & reflectors. Cross braces will also dictate to a degree how many bulbs you might need. Sounds like an awesome build & best of luck.
 

AQUANATURE

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MH inst an option in Australia our electricity prices are through the roof
 

AQUANATURE

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you know what I've never really looked at that in that way, I've just known LED to be more efficient and that is it

but what emits more light 200 watt LED of 250 watt MH
 

mtraylor

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Well I have a 255 gallon tank predominately SPS. I have been running 5 GHL mitras over the aquarium for some time. The 6300 series. I bought an Atlantik V4 for my new frag build, but I decided to take one of my mitras down on my main display and replace it with the V4 while I wait to get the frag tank up and running. My aquarium front to back is 27" so the 24" fixture front to back really fills the space.

I have had the fixture up now for a couple weeks. Well all I can say is the coral pop is amazing. Havnt seen anything like to be honest. REally nice! No exaggeration. The blues are more of purple blue and has an amazing effect on the fish, corals etc. When the fish come from under my others lights under the orphek, its a huge difference when there is predominately blues on. I have the fixture about 8 inches off the surface of the water right now....same height as my mitras and I have not had any issues with my sps. I don not see any disco effect so that is a plus.

Now the power supply for the Atlantic V4 is the same brand name as my mitras but the mitras is 24v output and the Atlantik V4 is 48v output around 240watts. The orpheck power supplies are allot warmer than the mitras. That being said. I have been using the same brand supplys on the mitras around 8 years so they are a good product that will serve you a long time.

Now with LED's power wattage ratting is not vanilla like on some MH's. The MH is either on or off. ON LED's The ratting is usually done with all the led's on max at 100%. With the ramping features etc and the few hours of peak of the day. You will usually get no where near max on a fixture unless you max everything out. All depends on your programing.

That being said. I really like what I see thus far with this fixture. It gets light everywhere with high par. If I decided to replace my fixtures on my main display. I would go with 4 v4's front to back. That would be awesome converage and PAR.

Hope this helps.

I will be posting some updates and stuff on this in my build thread soon.
 

mrpizzaface

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Hey gang,
Wanted to throw this out there with a little info about my experience. I have a 300 gallon sps tank with a geiseman spectra and reef brites. All told about 1,000 watts of power. I am NOT worried about heat as I live in oregon and for 9 months out of the year my house sits at around 65 degrees. I have 1,100 watts of heater in that system so it's either heaters or halides... one of them is almost always running. I got fantastic growth and coloration.. so much that I typically dismissed LEDs. My settings are ON and OFF, which is fine for me. The Spectra casts an AMAZINGLY even cloud of par.

Flash forward.. buying a new house so of course I need a bigger tank. 8x4x30" in wall. I can build any light rack I want as I am handy. I thought 4 250 halides down the middle and then 2 rows of t5 on each side... a 4 foot wide tank does present challenges for lighting.

But I have been hearing great things about the orphek lights and I really like that they are a big panel as opposed to pucks. So now I an thinking 3 of the big V4 units and nothing else?

Anyone have experience with them for sps growth and coloration? My tank is 80% spa with some euphoria and clams for good measure. How is the disco ball effect?

Do they make corals pop like just reef brites do?

Thanks for any info!
If it ain’t broke...
 

Arthur9.5

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If you are patient maybe you need to go with orphek, you’ll need to program each led (+48)
 

Oldreefer44

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Very easy to program. Will take a few minutes The hard part is that there is an infinite number of choices. The good news is that there are a number of threads that demonstrate what people are using in their systems.
 
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