Old MH bulbs kill coral ??

So I picked up a outer orbit fixture for a cheap ass price and was told the mh bulbs were pretty new.. well im beginning to think they are pretty OLD. A lot of my coral seemed to not open up as big as before and the last few weeks i have lost a small zoa colony and now my toad stool just recently started folding into a bowl/taco shape not looking to hot.. some mushrooms as well are starting to get smaller. thought it was my pc actinics so replaced them with some exotic panoramas but didnt help much.. Im thinking its my MH bulbs would the corals act like this with old bulbs?? I have checked at night for nudis but nothing. I recently ordered new MH phoenix 14k so they should be in monday and i may have a better answer by then but im worried about them making it till then..

 

What where you running before you got the MH?

 

i switched a lot. but for about a month i was running 250w x2 mh bulbs with brand new bulbs but i had no actinics with the fixture plus i figured that much w is over kill on a 55g before that i was running t5s but when i had the brand new bulbs on the 250w i only got up to about 5 hours of being on but everything looked huge and great

 

and everything was looking ok the first week or two with this fixture then slowly started going down hill. My hammers look great still and my eagle eyes are good and my gsp are still coming out but some others are not doing well

 

I would think that old bulbs could produce too much light in the wrong spectrum and not enough PAR.

Could you put the 'old' fixture back on until your new bulbs come in? If not, you might want to reduce the MH photoperiod or maybe even leave them off for the 2 - 3 days.

 

This uses double ended bulbs correct? Is the glass shied over the fixture in place?

Double ended bulbs have no UV protection and required a separate glass shield.

 

Old fixture has been gone and sold a few months ago. I already have been cutting the lights off early the past few days and just leaving the blue leds on. Hopefully things will change when i get these new bulbs installed. Kinda worried.

 

yes they are double ended and have glass covers on them.

 

That looks like the best course of action.

J