coral growth shots

Well I have been running MH for 9 months now.
A brief breakdown of my tanks history. Prior to installing my 2 250w metal halide lamps I was running 2 led fixtures and my tank was mainly lps with a few sps corals. The led fixtures were built by a local guy whose name I will not disclose, but were claimed to be equal to a 400w mh fixture. I was unable to preform any par tests to actually prove or disprove these claims, so we will leave it at that.
Well after purchasing a few sps corals I soon got the bug as my tank transformed to a mainly sps dominated tank. The only thing is I was having several problems with my corals. My corals seemed to survive, but they had very little color and growth was very slow.
After several meeting and conversations with the builder of my led fixtures and countless sps coral losses I switched several leds to change the color spectrum and could never get the corals to strive. The led builder was very helpful, but we were never able to get growth and colors that I knew with my tank care was possible. He claimed that there was something wrong with my water chemistry and that his fixtures were not at fault.
My parameters are as follows and stay stable in this area.
salinity:1.027
p04:0
nitrates:0
calcium:450
alk:13 dkh
mag: 1375
temp:78.5 to 79.5
9 months ago I finally decided to get rid of the leds and give metal halides a try. What I noticed is that within weeks my corals started to gain color and soon after that I saw more growth than I had seen in years under the leds.
Now dont get me wrong I am sure that leds are capable of growing and keeping colors at this point, but I believe the technology was not quite where it is now when I had my led fixtures.

Well enough talk I will now start posting growth pics.

 

Purple Stylo:
now

before

Orange Birdsnest
now

Before

Green Milli
now

before

 

Hyancith Birdsnest

Orange Monti Cap

Ora Verde Acropora

 

Good color and growth, they look very healthy. The monti is especially nice.

Not knowing enough about LED's or having enough experience with them, it's really hard for me make any kind of educated assessment of them. I do know that I like the look of the LED and combination MH fixtures. Still though I would be likely to go with high quality T5 fixture over LED if I had to choice, and MH were not an option.

What brand of bulb are you using?

 

I am running 250w DE Phoenix bulbs on lumatek Ballasts

 

It looks awesome!
I am actually going the other way changing from some T5s to LEDs.
I will let you know if I have the opposite effect it be kinda of fun to compare

 

Great looking tank!! That growth is awesome. The Monti-cap was pretty awesome to start with, but it's downright amazing now!

 

Thank you. I hope that you see an improvment switching to led.

Thanks, you know the funny part is I would really like to get rid of that monti cap just because it is too big for my 90. It takes up way to much area, almost half the tank now.