I was always under the impression it was the intensity of the light... not the time. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.... but if you are standing in the closet and then someone opens the door real fast BANG the intensity of the light gets yah. Would this not be the same with turning a brighter light on... regardless of how long or how you stagger the timers?

Tony might be able to chime in here I'm not sure. He's stepped out of a closet a few times and might have some details regarding his recovery.

You are doubling the intensity or at least the wattage (I'm not sure if 2*wattage = 2*intensity, but nonetheless it's a jump no matter what the relationship is specifically) so an adjustment period is to be expected. The best way to acclimate to a new intensity is to ramp it, which could involve either raising the lights (which I know you said wouldn't work, but still, I mention it because it's there). Another option is using layers of eggcrate that you remove one by one a couple days apart.

And then my personal preference which is just to keep the photoperiod but go in bursts. Let's say your photoperiod is 10am to 10pm. You keep the endpoints the same but you adjust the timer to do 15 minutes on, 45 minutes off. Then 30 on, 30 off, then 45 on, 15 off and then finally all the way on the whole time. A couple days apart between adjustments.

Or you can hope to heck that the corals just pout a bit but eventually recover. Which could work sometimes but I imagine it's the riskiest approach.

Coming out of the closet. :lol: Nice!

When I went from 250W to 400W I raised the lights and lowered the photo period. I ran them 2 hours on, 2 hours off; ramping up slowly over a couple of weeks. This seemed to work fine for me.

Thanks guys sounds good. My canopy can't lift and the eggcrate sorta scares me because of the tight clearance between tank and canopy. Sheets of eggcrate may restrict airflow enough to make my fans/cooling not work.

I'm going to keep the overal 1 - 8 photoperiod like you suggested Tony and work with the on/offs. I doubled the light so I would think 30 on 30 off for each hour would be ok but I've already ****ed a few off so maybe I will start with the 15/45 split. Only a few days with each setting so not so bad.

Thanks!

Acclimation has been going well. I went up in 5min increments daily until today. Should be 1-1:55, 2-2:55 etc but with only 5 min off now each hour I decided to just run the lgihts today 1 - 7:30. I'll adjust the overall endpoint now that I'm so close and eventually be at 1-8 again. Corals have not become more bleached and hopefully the few I ticked off will be happier soon.

Also added a nano wavebox today. I was amazed at how silent these units are compared to the fullsize ones. The unit itself is as quiet as my little 6025s and there is just the smallest swish swish sound which I kinda like. Stirred up a ton of crap and my skimmer has been really foaming nicely.

Also been filter sock free for about a week I guess? Display is just a tiny bit less clear but my skimmer has been working much better.

Wow Brett! Nice....the scape looks good. Something to be said about a simple scape. I like it. Colour looks good too! Haven't kept up with your build thread, just catching up now. I've been too busy tracking your runs.

Good to hear the wave box works well for you. Doug

Thx guys. Yeah the wavebox along with the added light seems to really be helping growth. I was noticing polyp extension down some and was due to replace my gfo and carbon in a few days but did it today. What a difference that made in just a few hours. I seem to VERY slowly be beating the hair algae but the bryopsis is going stronger than ever. We'll see how the new gfo works. I'm also up to 2 cups in the reactor vs the 1 to get things started.