I can absolutely believe it. One year is about the safe zone for trying SPS in a dry rock tank. Even though coralline may be growing on the glass, it takes that much longer to show up on the rocks. It’s a metaphorical desert; and corals don’t like it. You’ll also have higher par readings that first year as white rocks reflect more light under a coral and I don’t think they appreciate too much of that either.
Perfect! I ran the same 2 with the bulb 14" from the surface.
Perfect! I ran the same 2 with the bulb 14" from the surface.
Check my old build for more info.
I think he was right on the money. A dry rock tank in its first 2 years is like the worst Ghetto slum on earth. No food, no biome, no stability.
Beautiful. Just curious, what bulb combo did you use?I think that is accurate about the protective pigments.
I posted this earlier this year in a lighting thread that got shut down. I will post it here because I believe this as well. You can see that when I switched from LED to all T5 my corals that had "pretty" colors were all brown turds. a couple of months later, and I had amazing colors under whiter light. When my blues would hit them at night, then they would absolutely glow.
Metal Halide and T5 Grow Corals Better Than LED and Cost Less
Ecotech makes LEDs. You can't expect them to release the results of an experiment that give other technologies the edge, would you?www.reef2reef.com
This is a copy and paste from that post.
I started my tank with 4 Marsaqua black boxes and grew Acro's well with them. I have no hate for LED's and honestly, if I could light my new tank adequately with top of the line LED's without breaking the bank then I would have more than likely choose LED's.
If you look at my posts in this thread a month ago before I purchased all of my halide gear I was contemplating using 10 of my black boxes that I had laying around for the new tank.
I have run VHO's, T5's, LED, and Halide over the last two decades. What I can say from my own personal experience is this. Yes, I had good growth and color from the black box LED's. However, when I switched to T5's all of the corals looked brown. It wasn't until two months later that I started to see their true color. I am running all T5's with an actinic reef breeders LED bar and the colors I am getting now are amazing under white light!
Almost 2 years ago with black box lights
This was right after I switched to T5's. You can see how brown most of the pieces look. They didn't look that brown under the black boxes.
Fast forward and this is the result of T5's. No issues with color here.
At 1 year I went from 8t5's to the 250's. I ran them from the 1 year mark to 33 months so 21 months at 8hrs
That’s a little low for Lumenbrites. They can pound some serious par deep into a tank.
Look at this. It is how I set mine up as I had no par meter.
Found a large for $30........had to do the same.
Tank is 30" tall if that makes a difference.
If you can find someone to ship from the UK:
I don’t know anyone in the UKIf you can find someone to ship from the UK:
Reflectors
Computer designed reflectors for optimum light distribution inc, lumenarc 3, spiderlight and sunlight aquarium reflectors.www.fastlight.co.uk
Found these grow light reflectors and bought two for a future CDA build I’ll have coming in a few months. $90 plus $10 for the mogul socket setup. 22” x 22” and just about 9” in height for the reflector. Hammertone finish on all panels. Pendant does not come assembled. Small screws and wing nuts hold it together so assembly was a slight pain but you can disassemble and easily store. Mogul socket is way too short to center the bulb (Radium 250). I did purchase 4.3” socket extenders to get the bulb very close to center. $8 to add to total cost. Ordered them yesterday so will have to wait on them. Overall it looks good. Won’t have numbers for some time as I wait for new tank.
I may play with the light over a low boy frag tank I have yet to set up to get some dry tank par numbers. If I do I’ll post numbers here.
