Santa hooked me up with LED lights- Need your advice!

Happy Holidays Everyone-

Guess I was good this year or my wife loves me anyway.. You decide!!

Here are some of the specs for the lights I got:

- Blue Reef 120 watt LED system
- 55 - 2 watt LEDS (35 white and 20 blue)
- 2 chords and switches to turn on only white or only blue
- Dimensions 16L x 8.5W x 2.5H
- Built in power supply
- Fan cooled (3 Fans)

So as you can see from the pictures, I received two of these for over top of my 200 gallon Deep Dimension Tank 48L x 36D x 27T. My LFS said that each of these lights is comparable to a 250 watt MHL. There was very minimal paper work that came with them so PAR value and all of those specs are unknown to me at this point.

Right now I have a three light set up with:

- (1) Current 2x 150 MHL fixture
- (2) Current actinic fixtures with 2x55 watt bulbs on each side of the MHL fixture.. (so four bulbs total)

Here is where my questions start.

- When I hang the LED’s should I start them up higher over the water’s surface to give corals a chance to adjust or should I just shorten the light cycle at first?

- My plan was to keep the Actinics up thinking that when the LEDs were not on that this would still offer some nice light to start and end each day.. What are your thoughts? keep them up of take them down and supplement with smaller LEDs?

I’m about to read an article on LED’s in Coral Magazine from a couple months back so will get some information from there but I always like to get every ones life experience thoughts from here too. Any info or experience you can share would be great. Thanks much!!

 

i can not wait to see pics of these beauties hanging above the tank.

 

I basicially have the exact same ones hanging over my tank. I didn't have a hanging kit or anything to adjust how high the lights hung over the tank, so I put my frag rack completely on the sand and moved it up a little each week. I also cut down the amount of time the lights were on. I think I started with 4 hours and worked my way up to the complete 10.5 hours.

My PAR values were less than advertised. I used an Apogee MQ-200 to test.

 

When I get them hung I will post some pictures for sure.. I hope to have them up today at some point.

 

Thanks for the post. I received a hanging kit so I will have to see if I can adjust the height easily. Since this is my display tank I really can't rearrange the entire tank to move everything to the bottom so hopefully I can figure something out.

What about the actinics? Do you think I should leave them in place?

 

After you get your LEDs on and see what your corals look like with just the blue lights on I doubt you will even want the actinics anymore.

I would just raise your lights up and lower the photo period until your corals adjust.

My PAR through 10" of air and 24" of water is 115 on the sand bed. Still good par, but definately not what was advertised.

 

Update the LEDs are up. The look really good. Right now I have them about 16 inches off the top of the water. With the tank being 29 inches tall this would put the lights about 45 inches off the sand bed.

What do you think of that height to start? Thinking I could take then down another 6 inches once everything adjusts.

Will post some pictures in a few minutes..

 

Pictures post in my tank build.. Check the out!

http://www.3reef.com/forums/show-off-your-fish-tanks/remickjs-200-gallon-tank-build-121021.html