reef’r
Well-Known Member
Alright this will probably be a fairly long write up. I’ve done a lot of switching my lights are and finally think I have the setup I will have for the long haul so I rented a par meter. I have a 24” aquatic life hybrid fixture over a 24x20x20 cube, it’s an AIO that’s why I loose the 4” in the back filtration. I’m running 4 ATI blue plus at 100%, and xr15 g6 pro AB+ schedule and just added two Orphek or4 60s blue plus. My intent is to be able to really grow SPS anywhere I want and with this setup it is more than possible.
Couple pics of the tank so you can see what I’m working with and for reference for points in the tank when we get to the numbers. Top right is just what it sounds like, middle right is where you see the Milkastylo, birdsnest, red monti. Bottom right is Duncan and king Midas Zoas. I guess also where you can see the raja rampage frag. Center all other measurements are the rock structure left of those listed then across the front and back where the hammer is and frogspawn.
Here is the first set of numbers. In the first set that was the lights at current peak, the xr15 and orpheks were in acclimation mode and as you can see the numbers jump around a fair amount. I did testing with flow on just as the tank would normally be operating. With these settings corals look okay but I notice polyp extension in some is little, more on that. Second set of numbers is LED intensities bumped up to 50% t5 still on 100%. As you can see the numbers become much more flat, mostly due to radion and Orphek percentages being equal instead of 20 and 36%. With percentages bumped up to 50% for the final 1.5hours of peak I noticed polyps started popping out all over the place. These numbers were taken as an “average” because the readings were bouncing around quite a bit and a lot depends on angle of the meter and how the flow is affecting the reading. I made a makeshift want instead of sticking my arm in the tank
I then took the numbers from the higher intensity readings and input them into excel and got the averages for each spot in the tank which are the numbers in bold, and then took the average of those for a total tank average of 241 par. The top rock is a bit of an outlier but as you can see everywhere is in the tank is pretty flat and even coverage. I didn’t bother testing the back left and across the front again because those areas are kind of catch-all and corals move around there quite often. Over all I’m very happy with the results and know I still have a lot of room to move up, which I will, to try and get tank average to around the 250-300 par mark. Hope this info helps somebody out there
