LEDs and SPS coral

My hypothesis, and it is only that and based on very little to work with so far, is that LED's provide less light scatter. The effect is that corals get great light in many directions, but within the coral head have areas of very little light. What I have preliminarily seen with my LED's so far is that the shape of the growth is different. The corals seem to want to grow in directions tangential to the source of the light.

If thats true, it would be interesting by itself. If there is an effect and it is something else, that could be quite cool to learn.

One important note; I use AI Sol's right now and love them. I think MH is fine, but I am not arguing for its superiority at all, just curious.

 

you should go with some high powered leds or marineland reefcapable lights

 

i have 3 par 30 boost led over mt 20 gallon and can say that the softies love it but I havent tried a SPS I just might.

 

WOW!!

That's amazing growth!

I have never tried MH on my corals. I went directly to LEDs coming from T5's when I turned my FOWLR into a Mixed Reef.

Some observations though..

I had recently adopted a lot of SPS from a friend who quit the hobby. He used to have 3 150watt MH's in his 100 gallon tank. When I first got his remaining sps, most of them were either bleached or were brown.

Now in my tank, about a week after, I noticed that from bleached and brown, majority of them turned green.

Almost all our parameters are the same. Except my temperature is about 1-1.5 degrees higher.

Not sure if LED's had anything to do with it. Just an observation.

 

I have been looking at a few of the more intense LED fixture.

 

Huge difference between these two. First off marine land reefcapable lights are not high powered leds. 1w each compared to leds out that are 10w each like the xm-l at 160 lumens per watt.

Secondly its hard to keep up with the constant updates to leds> Cree just came out with a new chip thats over 200 lumens per watt.

Cree shatters LED theoretical maximum efficiency of 200 lumens per watt in the lab

 

What kind of LEDs are you running?

And I have one of those marineland reef capable LEDs and I got suckerd into some SPS by a buddy of mine (didn't want to b/c I was worried it wasn't going to be strong enough) and they weren't. Three pieces of neon green acro (I think?!?) and they started to fade. One turned dark green at the base and the other started browning...

75 Gal. 90+ lbs. LR. Rebuilding beings in July after devastating ICH outbreak...

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I also bought some Orange zoos so I'm interested to see how they grow. My button polyps went from one polyp to about three in prolly two weeks so these marineland things work. I did the math with the guy at my LFS and that fixture has a hair under 125W of fluorescent.

I just believe I would need two for SPS...

75 Gal. 90+ lbs. LR. Rebuilding beings in July after devastating ICH outbreak...

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3W CREEs.

DIY build: http://www.3reef.com/forums/i-made/diy-dimmable-rapidled-kit-converting-mhs-96138.html