What's your lighting schedule ?!

[arash53]

Thanks myka for great explanation and thank you madreefer

I am changing my main lights from pc to MH , I guess I should decrease my main light from 8 Hours to 6 , 2pm on 8pm off.

Is moonlight effects on anything or it is just for beauty and those not matter when goes on and off?

[MarkoD]

actinics: 3pm till 10pm
metal halides: 4pm till 9pm

no point in lights being on when no one is home

[Lampshade]

Just finished up my arduino project, so my lighting schedule is set to the sunrise/sunset times in the gold coast. Means shorter days in summer(Their winter). i have it offset by 4 hours so sunrise is about 11am now, sunset at 11pm. atinics are on for 1 hour after sunrise, then one MH turns on for 70% of the daylight time. for the last 70% the other MH is on followed by a 1 hour dusk with only actinics.

Do i think it will help my coral grow better? honestly? no. But i was bored, and this seemed pretty cool.

[Myka]

Originally Posted by arash53

Thanks myka for great explanation

I am changing my main lights from pc to MH , I guess I should decrease my main light from 8 Hours to 6 , 2pm on 8pm off.

Is moonlight effects on anything or it is just for beauty and those not matter when goes on and off?

You're welcome.

When you are changing from a lower light setup to a much higher light setup you will want to go very slowly. Start off with only an hour or two of halide, and increase it by a half hour every 2-4 days watching how your corals are doing. Watch for shrunken flesh in LPS, and bleaching. Usually corals will bleach slowly when it comes to more light than they are used to, so if you see bleaching the problem has been happening for a few days already, so you would need to cut back by at least an hour before ramping up again even slower.

Moonlights are aesthetic. It is well known that spawning activity and many other behaviors are linked to the moon's phases. So moonlights came along, and people quickly realized that it is the gravitational pull of the moon's phases, not the actual light provided by the moon that affects the ocean's inhabitants.

[Lance]

moonlights: 9am to 10am/10pm to 11pm
T5's: 10am to 10pm
MH's: noon to 8pm

[arash53]

This would be my light systems change plan from PC to MH :

2Pm to 8Pm :

15 min ON 45 Min OFF for week 1
30 min ON 30 Min OFF for week 2
same for week 3
45 ON 15 OFF week 4
same for week 5
Full time on after that.

How is that sounds?

[Wanderer]

LED moonlight 24 / 7
quad lamp T5

KZ fiji purple / superblue (one each ) 11:00 -10:30
KZ new gen / superblue (one each) 11:30 - 10:00

[doch]

Mine is like so:

Actinics: 10am-11pm
"Whites": 11am-10pm
Moonlights: 11pm-6am

Now, if it weren't for the fridays, saturdays and sunday when we're all home, I'd fire everything up a little later, but I like to go down and tinker in the mornings on the weekends. (My wife calls it obsessing... lol)

[arash53]

Oh ,So you have your moonlights ON all night

[Myka]

Originally Posted by arash53

This would be my light systems change plan from PC to MH :

2Pm to 8Pm :

15 min ON 45 Min OFF for week 1
30 min ON 30 Min OFF for week 2
same for week 3
45 ON 15 OFF week 4
same for week 5
Full time on after that.

How is that sounds?

Why would you complicate it like that? That's a lot of messing around with timers! For lights, I just use the cheap $8 timers that have those little tabs that you move around. So to move a tab over a half hour takes a whopping 3 seconds. To mess around with several on/off settings in a day would be a pain in the butt. Doesn't really matter how you do it though.

What kind of corals do you have? You probably don't have to take 5 weeks to make the switch.