LED or Metal Halide?

You should try a 150 watt k2-viper metal halide. It will fit all your needs and it around tha price range. I would look into it.

 

I would stick to the MH setup. I ran Leds in my system for almost 2 years trying just about all types of corals. Everything seemed to be doing good up to about the 8 month mark then I noticed that a lot of coral growth on my sps corals stopped and any of my lps corals just had no color. I ended up selling my led setup and switched to MH. Since the switch I have noticed almost twice the growth and my corals are starting to recove nicely. I have only had the metal halides for around 4 months and the turnaround that my tank has made is amazing.
I have not used any of the new led setups that have been coming out recently but the setub that I was running had really good par numbers and on paper was putting out as much light as 2 400watt MH lamps. I currently run 2 250W DE Phoenix bulbs and the growth and color is just amazing.
Led is new technology that is coming down in price and the quality of light output is improving but in my experience just do not compare with the quality of light you recieve from MH.

 

Only thing is that you are getting back into all the inherent disadvantages to MH lighting.

It will add heat, it is going to need bulb replacements every 9 months or so, it will use a helluva lot more electricity (15X more) and going PAR for PAR I am willing to bet that the 2 BoostLEDs still outperforms a single 150 W MH. A 250 Watt might take 3 or 4 BoostLEDs to replicate - but at that point you can get Boost's new LED fixture for $300. It is over 100 Watts of LED lighting and has Violet LEDs.


Unless you are given them, I would have a hard time spending money on anything to do with Metal Halides now that LEDs seem to be taking their place (tho admittedly slowly).

 

Do you remember what brand fixture it was? How many watts it was? What was the CCT? What was the ratio of lamp colors? Was it dimmable?

 

It was not a dimable unit, but it was 2 fixtures using 12 luxen rebel tri stars @540 lumen each star with no optics. 6 cool white and 6 royal blue stars per fixture. (so effectively 18 cool white and 18 royal blue) they were made by a local reefer here in NM. I am sure that the current Led fixtures are a great improvment and I have read many threads with people having good results, but with my previous experience I would not recommend leds on an sps tank for sustained results.
It may well be my tank because there are people having good results, but when speaking to the builder of the fixture I had he stated that he was having great growth and color and when he gave me several frags from his tank they were the same colorless corals that I had in my tank. After the last few months in my tank under MH i have seen coral coloration in my tank that was never obtainable through the use of leds.

 

Those boost lights could be good for a fuge or sump too

 

I'm still on the fence but I'm starting to lean towards 3 of the BoostLED's bulbs.

I want to set up a dusk/dawn effect, should i get one all blue and the other two 3 blue 2 white?

I'm still a little hesitant to go with the LED's over Halide or even T5 but so far I've read nothing but good reviews.

By the way check out my build thread. Please comment!

http://www.3reef.com/forums/show-off-your-fish-tanks/mr-oceans-30-breeder-reef-build-100290.html

 

Metal Halides