Lighting your reef... Best bang for your buck.

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Ultraviolet light will harm corals. Corals defense to this light is getting more colorful, but if you read back a few pages, I posted a link to an article where this theory was tested and they found no benefit to exposing corals to actual ultraviolet light (not to be confused with violet colored light). Take your UV sterilizer, remove the lamp, and put it over your tank and see what happens. It's not going to be beneficial.
 
A uv lamp was supposed to kill bacteria I thought? I never heard it was to help coral but to kill algae and disease bacteria in the water.
 
It kills pretty much anything that goes through the sterilizer. It's definitely not something you want to expose your livestock to. There aren't any LED fixtures with ultraviolet LEDs in them as far as I know. They just call them UV, but they are just violet.
 
That's what I thought, just wanted to make sure I don't misunderstand. True ultra violet kills, but these violet lights coming out aren't that. Any benefit of having a few of these or is it anther red/green gimmick??
 
nope UVA is not violet. UVA is from 315nm to 400nm
Violet is range around 401nm to 420nm and purple is 421nm to about 430nm. These are not exact how it works, but its approx. neither violet nor purple are the UVA we hope we can get out of our fixtures
 
I'm curious to know if at all possible to hook up a controller to either the taotronics or the knock off version
 
A controller could turn the lights off and on, but it's not going to dim them.
I have a new update:

My ongoing study of these units has me convinced that they are far more powerful than we think. I am growing montipora cap and montipora sp. at 20"+ away from a dimmable fixture with the whites turned all the way down and the blues at 100%.
The corals are colorful and the anemones in the tank are also thriving.

I believe this is the reason people are losing color on their sps. Most of the sps in my tank took months to acclimate to this lighting, the ORA Red Planet, and an Acropora Valida being the last to catch up.
I'm running my daylights over my 300 for only 5 hours and the blues for 10, and everything is coloring up well, plus growing very quickly.

I believe the PAR meter is a very poor gauge in determining how potent LEDs are in general.
 
Is anyone using reefbreeders, or is everyone using taotronics? They are both $179 shipped..
Need to get something for my 56gcolumn.
 
mr_X said:
A controller could turn the lights off and on, but it's not going to dim them.
I have a new update:

My ongoing study of these units has me convinced that they are far more powerful than we think. I am growing montipora cap and montipora sp. at 20"+ away from a dimmable fixture with the whites turned all the way down and the blues at 100%.
The corals are colorful and the anemones in the tank are also thriving.

I believe this is the reason people are losing color on their sps. Most of the sps in my tank took months to acclimate to this lighting, the ORA Red Planet, and an Acropora Valida being the last to catch up.
I'm running my daylights over my 300 for only 5 hours and the blues for 10, and everything is coloring up well, plus growing very quickly.

I believe the PAR meter is a very poor gauge in determining how potent LEDs are in general.
Click to expand...

I agree with you I just upgraded tanks and lights to 2 Taoronics (from 4bulb t5 on 29g) on my 55g and moved all the corals over under the lights which are at like 20% and it is just amazing how much better everything is doing.. my acans open up more and everything is growing from top to bottom and sps are doing great. These lights are very powerful.
 
It's been 2 weeks since I had my knock off taotronics 120 watt dimmable and I could honestly say my corals look GREAT!.nice polyp extension as well.i have a mixed reef with sps,lps and softies in a 34 solana .the only thing I had a problem with was the unit I bought didnt have optic lenses and with my setup I had no choice but to hang the unit from the ceiling.i have it hanging 11 inches over the water line with 90 degree lenses.now I'm not blind sitting in the living room.my only problem is my unit came with an option of lunar lights which consist of 3 of the blues being lit and they are too bright for lunar lights,anyone know if they make blue optic lenses and will this correct the problem of them being too bright?i only use my whites for 2 hours a day and the rest are blues..ooh and as far as electric is concerned coming from metal halides to led's my electric bill is 55 dollars cheaper than last month
 
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