Sustainability of Corals Under LED's

Its your system being too clean I bet, maybe too much PAR.

Same here, I'm getting great growth out of softies.

2 days is not much of a test, and if you dimmed them by any real percentage your corals will respond negatively for a while as they re-acclimate. The big problem with LED it the focus intensity of leds. Especially DIY with individual reflectors. With halides and t5s you can get a very good apples to apples comparison. 4 of these bulbs on tank A versus Tank B are very similar in par. No you have a lot more difficult time comparing. Between different BINs, led brands, colors, drivers, dimming percentages, programming lens focusing, etc its hard to really compare those apples to someone else's dingos.

 

Let me guess, 10-20K worthless lights with some RB

 

Yeah they're the 20k multichips. But i would imagine they're the same ones that companies like Orphek use so they can't be that bad. I mean they are growing my sps like crazy just not my softies.

 

So do you think i should keep the lights dimmed for a few weeks?

About the water being too clean, i tried "dirtying" it up but i started getting nuisance algae and my soft coral still wasn't growing. My bubble and sun coral are my 2 soft corals that are doing great but only because i feed them. My water chemistry has to be alright since those corals are doing fine so it probably is low nutrients like you said but I'm not sure how to properly get my nutrients up without causing algae.

I also tried running my lights for only 4 hours a day for a month but that didn't help, then i upped to 5 then to 6 with no luck.

 

LMAO!

LEDs are not all equal. Which unit are we discussing? Marineland single bright? AI SOL? Reef Breeders?

Some units won't grow coral and are not advertised to be reef-capable.

As with any other lighting, if you don't match wattage, spectrum, and optics with the coral type, tank depth, etc., you will get less than stellar results.

 

This would have been another nice thread, if, like the original poster asked, it was a repository of the fixture type, tank size, types of corals and growth shots over time.

It's turned into a p!$$ing argument instead.

 

I would be interested in knowing specifics about others lighting schedules & What they are keeping at what depth & power usage. I think a portion of people might have things set up wrong & are not getting much growth. I would like to see a sticky for that info only.

 

I don't know why people keep saying this. They just can't accept change and admit that, yes LEDs work! So ridiculous that people believe LEDs don't work. One of my LFS had one tank with LEDs for a few weeks, they switched back to halide lights and said, "yup, there is no way LEDs grow corals. LEDs are supplement lighting only." I just looked them and said, "ooookay...but we've all seen LED tanks only and the corals are growing." They then tried to sell me halide lights...

 

For what it's worth, the other lighting systems have been out a lot longer than LEDs. Those systems also took time to get the bugs worked out. LEDs are currently in that "tweak until we find the best approach". This includes things like spectrum, intensity, etc. The only blame I can put on my LEDs is being too bright and me not light acclimating them in my Biocube. Other than that, kept lots of corals alive.

 

If LED's can't grow coral, why is every light vendor selling them?