Adding First HO light to established tank

To give some back story, I had the intentions of setting up a reef tank about 1 year ago... Well things got delayed a bit on the lighting, so the the tank, a 120G drilled tank with a refugium has about 60-70 lbs of live rock and fish, with a healthy population of hermits, snails, shrimp, worms, pods, and other inverts, etc. The tank is fairly mature and growing sponges in the overflows and has coralline everywhere. No corals or light-sensitive sessile inverts have been yet (except for some inadvertent hitchhikers).

Up until now I have been running a 48" 40W 50/50 fixture above the tank.

I am getting a 6x54W T5 fixture today that has 3x54W 460 'blue' bulbs and 3x54W 10K bulbs. (I'd eventually like to swap two of the 460's to 420's and a couple of the 10K's to 12K's).

With the switch, I can run two bulbs at a time, four at a time, or all six.

Since I do not yet have corals, I am thinking that I should still slowly introduce all this light to the fish and coralline algae.

My proposed regimen includes starting with two bulbs for the first week, then going to four bulbs for the next week, then ramping up to all six by week three, or maybe waiting to use all six until I put in corals.

What do you think? I'd really like to not hurt/ stress the fish, and also want to avoid bleaching coralline algae (don't know how this would respond to sudden changes in light intensity).

Your experienced advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Will

BTW, I'm really excited about this new fixture!!! :biggrinbo:biggrinbo

 

run them all.. just cut down your lighting cycle hours down a bit..

maybe run full lights for 6 hours, and actinics for 8hrs a day..

slowly bring fulllights to 8hrs, and actinics to 11-12hrs. over a week or so...

 

So, I found out that I was running an OLD 32W 48" bulb before. Just two 54W bulbs are more than three times the watts, and with all six bulbs on, over 10 times the wattage than before!!!

Well, the fish have been pretty stressed out with the new light... they were doing really well up until after the first day of the addition of the light. The ones especially acting weird are my Six Line Wrasse and the False Lemon Peel Angel. The Six Line just seems disoriented, while the angel has been swimming up and down the corner glass a lot... also the Angel seems to have a newly reddish color to his upper half... made me think that it is too much UV exposure too fast... Don't fish need to build up a tolerance to intense light??

So, I've scaled back the time quite a bit and they're acting a lot more normal for now... planning to s-l-o-w-l-y expose them to more light each day. Since I don't have any corals or animals requiring photosynthesis, I'm going to take it easy on the light for a while.

 

good way to go about it gabba. thats lookin after your fish. congrats.