Lighting advice

[user129]

I have a Led build on my mixed reef tank right now from Rapid Led but I am move to a Radion fixture in a few days!!! I need advice if I should over time turn the Radion up or will it be ok just to start with whatever program right away since I already have had Led on my tank?

Thanks for the help.

[darkreef]

When I got my sols I ran them at 25% then slowly brought the lighting up 3-5 % a week . You don't wanna bleach anything good luck

[reefmandan]

How big the tank is, the number of lights and how high they are hung off the water all can affect how intense your lighting should be. I put a single Radion with TIR lenses on my 40 breeder, hung about 18" above the water at 60%. No bleaching. I'd start low and increase by 5% a week until you are where you want to be.

[craigwmiller]

It really depends on the intensity of your current leds. Without a PAR meter it might be difficult to compare, but you can probably make a reasonable visual judgement of the intensity before and after... If possible even take a picture from the same place before and after (ideally with a camera you can set manually for white balance) and then compare on a computer.

It won't hurt, however, to start them dimmer than your current settings and have it ramp up automatically over a week or so. (using a coral acclimatization mode)

[user129]

My tank is a 90G There is I have 64 led over my tank, half white CREE XP-G
and half blue CREE XT-E and they hanging 71/2 in off the water line.
I am planing on hanging the Radions at 9 in

[Aquattro]

You just have to experiment. I started my 6 x sol at 70%, bumped to 100% the next day. No issues. That was coming off of 400w MH.

[asylumdown]

I'd say it actually depends more one what corals are in your tank. I've mentioned this to a few people and have heard others have had similar experiences - at high powers using all the colours radions (and I'm assuming lots of other brands) have can roast a lot of LPS, acclimated or not. If you've got lots of open brains, chalices, some acans and other very fleshy LPS species , you'll want to weight the colours in your program a lot more heavily towards the blue (perhaps not even using the red channel at all) and probably start at a pretty low intensity

None of my SPS have any problems with it, though I can't run mine at any higher than 75% max intensity or they burn, but they do get all channels at 100% (75% overall intensity) for about 3 hours every day.

I can't keep chalices to save my life in that tank. Anywhere that light hits them directly they bleach to white, then die, even if they're on the sand bed. Euphyllias and elegance corals do just fine, but scolies, open brains, etc. bleach over the course of a few months until they're practically transparent. They don't necessarily die, but they look awful and seem to lose all margin for error in terms of stress.

When I remove those corals and put them under a Kessil A150 ocean blue (less white, more blue, no red or green), they make a complete and spectacular recovery.

I could adjust the radions to be able to keep the LPS species, but the SPS love it as it is so I don't. If you've got a true mixed reef I'm sure there's a middle ground that you could find, it will just take some playing with the program.