Phoenix 14K 250W DE vs 20K 250DE

Bpb · Jul 28, 2019

DogsRule said:
OP, just thought I'd throw this out there, just incase. Have you tried rotating the bulb within the housing/reflector? I've never run DE MH bulbs, but can tell you some SE bulbs can really shift in spectrum depending on how the bulb is orientated in the socket. My current 14K Hams can go from a very yellow to the desired 14K look depending on bulb rotation. For this particular batch of bulbs, the nipple ( on the inner bulb for SE ) needs to be facing down. Other bulbs & brands I ran in the past didn't seem to matter. Just thought it might be worth checking before you go spending any $. HTH

Interesting. I have mine facing upward (same bulbs). I’ve never heard of anyone running the nipple facing down.

leepink23 · Jul 28, 2019

cwk84 said:
I meant to say on eballasts they would be super blue. Autocorrect doesn't like that word I guess...

Mine is on electronic ballast.

DogsRule · Jul 28, 2019

Bpb said:
Interesting. I have mine facing upward (same bulbs). I’ve never heard of anyone running the nipple facing down.

I know, I always used to run them facing up no matter the brand or K rating (I believe that was also what was advised back in the day) I honestly thought I had a "bad" batch of bulbs when I first ran these current bulbs. Even swapped out a few spare ballasts & moved bulbs to different reflectors. End result, this group of bulbs have to run with the nipple down. My 14K Hams that will replace this batch (when the time comes) have the arm & nipple at 90 degs (current batch are in line), so maybe I can go back to then running them in the usual up placement.

Bpb · Jul 28, 2019

DogsRule said:
I know, I always used to run them facing up no matter the brand or K rating (I believe that was also what was advised back in the day) I honestly thought I had a "bad" batch of bulbs when I first ran these current bulbs. Even swapped out a few spare ballasts & moved bulbs to different reflectors. End result, this group of bulbs have to run with the nipple down. My 14K Hams that will replace this batch (when the time comes) have the arm & nipple at 90 degs (current batch are in line), so maybe I can go back to then running them in the usual up placement.

Make sense of this for me. I never knew about the geometry of the components dictating run Orientation. Which direction should these go?

cwk84 · Jul 28, 2019

leepink23 said:
Mine is on electronic ballast.

This is very close to what it looks like when they're firing up. First, they are super yellow then they get super purple/blue (that's where I get excited haha) then they get a slight green hue and then they get super BRIGHT all of a sudden and a little more white/yellow. I hate the green hue, though. But that would be easily corrected with 1-2 purple plus T5s in the mix. I'm getting my Ushios tomorrow. I'll post a picture. According to various descriptions, they are white with a blue/purple hue. It is described as a MH with an actinic spectrum. I like white, I just don't like yellow or green haha. I want a cool white/blue/purple tank. Let's hope that is what I will be getting.

DogsRule · Jul 29, 2019

Bpb said:
Make sense of this for me. I never knew about the geometry of the components dictating run Orientation. Which direction should these go?

It was a hot topic of debate 20 odd years ago ( so was mounting the bulb horizontal or square to tank length) . Your current bulb looks to be the same as my future "replacement" bulbs (note the white "arm" at 90 degs to the nipple). My current bulbs have the arm & nipple aligned ( I'm guessing this is an older design/batch of bulbs & maybe why I have seen the color shift issue with this batch of bulbs when not aligned just right in the sockets). I can snap a pic tomorrow of the same 14K Hami bulbs side by side to show the different layout, but it's getting O/T from OPs original Q

A. grandis · Jul 29, 2019

Here:

Dr. Sanjay Joshi wrote back in the day about that:

"When using lamps in the horizontal position, it may be best to orient the lamp so that its exhaust tip (affectionately called the nipple) on the inner arc tube points up."
FROM:
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-03/sj/index.php
The article has some other valuable information about halides.

leepink23 · Jul 29, 2019

cwk84 said:
This is very close to what it looks like when they're firing up. First, they are super yellow then they get super purple/blue (that's where I get excited haha) then they get a slight green hue and then they get super BRIGHT all of a sudden and a little more white/yellow. I hate the green hue, though. But that would be easily corrected with 1-2 purple plus T5s in the mix. I'm getting my Ushios tomorrow. I'll post a picture. According to various descriptions, they are white with a blue/purple hue. It is described as a MH with an actinic spectrum. I like white, I just don't like yellow or green haha. I want a cool white/blue/purple tank. Let's hope that is what I will be getting.

Definitely share pictures, hopefully it turns out like you want. I believe with the t5 you should be able to get what you are looking for!

cwk84 · Jul 29, 2019

I just installed the Ushios. Here is a picture without T5s:

It is clearly purple/blue but it's not visible to that extent in person. With T5s on the overall ambient color is "icier" than before. So it's a step in the right direction. Since the bulbs are very dim, I increased the photoperiod from 4 to 8 hours. I guess to get the corals to look more interesting I will have to supplement with more T5s or even LEDs at some point. For now, I will wait a couple of months for the corals to adjust and color up. I'm sure they will become richer in color once everything stabilizes. The only coral that looks flashy is the tiny piece of GSP on the back wall. They really pop in person (really bright green). But everything else looks SOOO boring. My anemones are brown basically.

cwk84 · Jul 29, 2019

The color changed a little bit. Maybe it's just me. I think they got bluer. I really really REALLY like the way the tank looks now. It is just the right amount of blue. Looks like xenon headlights. Really awesome. But again, my corals just look so lifeless

I hope this will change. I only have 2ppm nitrate. Should I up it a bit? Or should I feed my corals to get them to color up faster?

Bpb · Jul 29, 2019

cwk84 said:
The color changed a little bit. Maybe it's just me. I think they got bluer. I really really REALLY like the way the tank looks now. It is just the right amount of blue. Looks like xenon headlights. Really awesome. But again, my corals just look so lifeless I hope this will change. I only have 2ppm nitrate. Should I up it a bit? Or should I feed my corals to get them to color up faster?

I don’t think they look lifeless at all. Perhaps you could show us some examples of some tanks you’re shooting for (with the same type corals you currently have). Also....keep in mind, frequent changes to lighting will cause colors to become more drab due to stress. My law of the land on lighting, unless something is dying as a result of my lights, I give every change a year before trying something else. It’s a hard rule to keep to but the tank thanks me for it

shred5 · Jul 29, 2019

cwk84 said:
I just installed the Ushios. Here is a picture without T5s:

It is clearly purple/blue but it's not visible to that extent in person. With T5s on the overall ambient color is "icier" than before. So it's a step in the right direction. Since the bulbs are very dim, I increased the photoperiod from 4 to 8 hours. I guess to get the corals to look more interesting I will have to supplement with more T5s or even LEDs at some point. For now, I will wait a couple of months for the corals to adjust and color up. I'm sure they will become richer in color once everything stabilizes. The only coral that looks flashy is the tiny piece of GSP on the back wall. They really pop in person (really bright green). But everything else looks SOOO boring. My anemones are brown basically.

Which Ushio bulb?

A. grandis · Jul 29, 2019

cwk84 said:
The color changed a little bit. Maybe it's just me. I think they got bluer. I really really REALLY like the way the tank looks now. It is just the right amount of blue. Looks like xenon headlights. Really awesome. But again, my corals just look so lifeless I hope this will change. I only have 2ppm nitrate. Should I up it a bit? Or should I feed my corals to get them to color up faster?

Nothing fast is good in reefkeeping. That's rule number 1.
Forget the tank for a while and go slow with the new lights so the organisms don't suffer too much with the changes. Keep less hours and add a bit to the photoperiod every week.
Long-term... long-term...

cwk84 · Jul 30, 2019

Bpb said:
I don’t think they look lifeless at all. Perhaps you could show us some examples of some tanks you’re shooting for (with the same type corals you currently have). Also....keep in mind, frequent changes to lighting will cause colors to become more drab due to stress. My law of the land on lighting, unless something is dying as a result of my lights, I give every change a year before trying something else. It’s a hard rule to keep to but the tank thanks me for it

Well, I don't know what you seem to see in my picture, but my corals look lackluster to me. My nems used to look really really bright and colorful, now they look really dark. They don't fluoresce at all and the red color is not red anymore it's more of a dark purple. I'm almost certain that LEDs would NOT change that. I will have to wait for a very long time until everything stabilizes.

shred5 said:
Which Ushio bulb?

20k DE 250W

cwk84 · Jul 30, 2019

TheGreatWave said:
Remember one of the biggest proponents of MH here keeps a big tank of zoas, so don't listen to the nonsense about needing MH to grow SPS etc. (Not my rules)

Just found that out lol.

Bpb · Jul 30, 2019

Still not sure who’s rule it is that you need MH to grow sps. To make that superlative of a statement would indicate the opposite to also be true, that you CANT grow sps with anything else. I haven’t seen anyone say that exactly. Even Grandis hasn’t been that absolute about it

Bpb · Jul 30, 2019

cwk84 said:
Well, I don't know what you seem to see in my picture, but my corals look lackluster to me. My nems used to look really really bright and colorful, now they look really dark. They don't fluoresce at all and the red color is not red anymore it's more of a dark purple. I'm almost certain that LEDs would NOT change that. I will have to wait for a very long time until everything stabilizes.

20k DE 250W

If you’re looking for something like this
You’re not going to get it from metal halides.
Your anemones will need some time to adjust. It can take months to change to new lighting. Change them again and they’ll just prolong the browning.

If you want that kind of fluorescence, it’s not going to happen with such a white light dominant environment. 20k halides are white light.

cwk84 · Jul 30, 2019

I haven't heard it from anyone anywhere explicitly but there are some old school reefers who seem very opinionated when it comes MH vs anything else. There are so many fallacies stated here in this thread, it tells me that there is a strong bias towards MHs. You want to hear one fallacy? It's the "every coral pops under LEDs" nonsense. I subscribed to that at first and I even stated that but it doesn't make any sense because a healthy coral under the right spectrum WILL develop the pigments it needs to display its colors. If a frag is pale, such as in my case, not even LEDs will make them pop. A coral does not know whether it is lit by a metal halide or lit by a LED fixture. The coral only knows spectrum and intensity. There are good LED fixtures and there are bad LED fixtures and there are users who give their corals only blue light and there are those who give them the full spectrum. Those who give them the full spectrum will have colorful corals because they give them the full spectrum. I want to see an experiment where a tank is divided into two sides with frags from the same mother colony. The right side will be lit by a 14K Phoenix MH and the left side by a brand LED fixture. The spectrum of the LEDs will be adjusted to match the spectrum of the 14K MH with the help of special measuring devices to make sure the spectrum is the same. After one year you put the LED frag in the MH area and the MH area in the LED area. Then you take pictures with a high-quality camera, you adjust the WB, and then you look at the pictures. Additionally, you take samples of the corals' tissues to look at them under the microscope to further determine the health and level of pigmentation. Maybe it would even be possible to link the uptake of certain trace elements to how well the coral displays the color that trace element is associated with. Say, you have two red frags and the LED frag has less potassium in its tissue than the MH frag despite you not seeing any difference. Then you theorize that the higher uptake of potassium might indicate that the coral has more red pigments. I don't know if it really works like that but considering that someone here claimed that you can "fine-tune" color with trace elements, it might be a way to determine the level of coloration. This would be a somewhat "scientific" approach rather than simply claiming LED frags look like crap under MHs because they weren't grown under MHs. This thinking is fallacious because too many variables such as tank chemistry, the maturity of the tank, stability, spectrum etc. are often unknown. You cannot hold a frag from for buddy that has LEDs else under your MHs and determine that LEDs suck based on your visual impression. That's nonsense.

cwk84 · Jul 30, 2019

Bpb said:
If you’re looking for something like this
You’re not going to get it from metal halides.
Your anemones will need some time to adjust. It can take months to change to new lighting. Change them again and they’ll just prolong the browning.

If you want that kind of fluorescence, it’s not going to happen with such a white light dominant environment. 20k halides are white light.

The red zoas you can see in my picture looked just like that under my T5s before the tank crash which obviously took the better of them. Yes, this is what I want and I was under the impression that this is what I will be getting with MHs since, you know, they color up corals better than LEDs. Sorry for the sarcasm. I had to haha. I want healthy colorful corals and if MH won't get me there I will do the switch back to T5s or even LEDs. Regardless, I will stick to what I said. I will let the tank adjust and let the Ushios do its thing. I really like the color temperature of the tank now. I have drab looking corals so it would be hasty blame the lack of coloration on the fact that MHs won't make corals fluoresce like LEDs.