WWC lighting schedule.... What a difference (pics)

[TheSilentReefer]

Just to give you guys abit of an insight I have been running my own schedule for a long time and thought I was getting fairly decent results.

I obviously knew of WWC, even called in on a visit to WDW on a holiday, I was in awe of there tanks, so much more colourful than we have over here.

My setup uses a 4ft Evergrow pro reef unit, which I run 2 x 2 T5 54 watt tubes at each side to help with shadowing.
I always thought I was getting good colours for a long time bit still not the WWC colours and colours you guys seem to be getting in the states.

So back to the tank, I was running an intense 6/7 hours with the leds with a mixture of bulbs this was achieving about 580 par with some of the higher acros and 150 on the sand , but then I was reading up on the WWC schedule, about a more evenly distributed par across the tank.

This would be a big advantage too me as I was struggling to get some of the sps in the correct positions due to running out of room but with the new schedule it would be so much of a problem,

So I ordered 4 x ati blue plus tubes and got my friend around with his par meter to see what we could do.
We ended up dropping the white channel almost to nothing.

So I took a picture of one of my acros before I changed the lights and to say its only been a couple of week in between the pictures, im amazed!!!

It took some getting used to the more blue spectrum in the tank.
At the same time as setting the new schedule I raised the lights from 14" above the water line to 20" this really helped with the blending of the optics on the leds.

The evergrows came with 80 degree lenses I believe.

Enough of me talking here are the results, I cant wait to see how the tank progresses now...

Todays picture....

 

[TheSilentReefer]

The small frag of ARC fireworks is looking the best I have ever had, it is a slow grower though :(

 

[lolgranny]

The small frag of ARC fireworks is looking the best I have ever had, it is a slow grower though :(

You’ll take that comment back soon. It grows like a weed once it’s roots are down

 

[TheSilentReefer]

You’ll take that comment back soon. It grows like a weed once it’s roots are down

Wouldn’t be a bad problem to have!!

 

[Ryan t]

Craig, what percent is your whites on?

 

[happyhourhero]

I would almost lend more impact to adding t5 more so than the schedule change though I’m sure that helped too.

 

[jda]

You can read up on DLI - direct light interval. Basically says that, within reason, 8 hours of 400 PAR and 12 hours of 300 PAR will still get you 3600ish and should be about the same in the end. That being said, 24 hours of 150 PAR or 1 hour of 3200 PAR does not work.

It is a rough guesstimate, but I have found that 8 hours of slightly more PAR is about the same as 10 hours of slightly less.

All of that said, I agree with the above that it was probably the spectrum in the T5s that did more.