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Please Note... This section is out of date. We are out fishing.
Description Go!
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Lighting Go!
As promised in the last update, I have swapped out two of my AB 250W 10K metal halides for 400W 20K Radiums. These are driven by a couple of Blueline pulse start ballasts from Sunlight Supply. I was quite pleased by the bluer look of the tank and the way they made some of my pieces seem to fluoresce even more. In fact, I liked the look so much that last February, I added another complete fixture into the hood bringing my total now to seven (4 AB 10K 250s and 3 20K 400W Radiums). They are staggered, beginning and ending with a 10K and all except the last radium are still housed in Spiderlight reflectors.
I had to use a Reef Optix reflector to house that one because of space constraints, the latter reflector being both a bit smaller and narrower. I have also finally changed my lighting pattern from starting in the middle and spreading outwards to the much more sensible right to left 'sweep' with each individual halide coming on (and turning off) in 15 minute increments. Not only does this more closely mimic the natural rise and fall of sunlight but now the all of the bulbs will ultimately have the same amount of burn time on them. |
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| Why it took me so long to do this is a complete and utter mystery; it was simple, there are absolutely no negatives, and it clearly makes more sense. But then maybe that was the problem; reef keepers aren't often presented with 'no lose' propositions. By the way, my photoperiod these days is a total of 12 hours for the halides and 14 hours for the actinics. |
Still a bit early to tell whether these changes have had any effect on the corals however. Everything that had color, seems to still have color and everything that didn't (*@^#@%* A. efflourenses) still doesn't. |
| One final small change here (that may turn out to be the biggest of all) is that we finally removed all of the actinic 'spray shields' that covered the lights. I was always afraid that at some 5” off the water, I would be taking a chance of a bulb exploding from being splashed. But as the shields got older, they began to get more and more opaque which brought down the light levels considerably. We noticed this whenever we'd take one out to clean it. So, one day we just left 'em all out to see what would happen. Nothing happened…at least, nothing bad. |
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