Matts coral connection in Fort Walton Beach, Florida was a huge proponent of kessils when they hit the market 5 years ago or so. He promptly swapped to an all kessil system in his store. In his display tank that has had them for numerous years the lack of shading and directional nature of even great leds is prevalent. The bottom of every sps colony, were talking softball sized pieces, was dead. As the colony grew, which it did grow well in his display tank, it shaded the lower portions of the sps. I never got this far on my personal tank, so all i can do is gauge from one of my LFS display tanks. This did however really effect my lighting decision going forward with my new tank. Currently i run T5 because if i want to grow corals for more than a few years leds alone will lead to shading. This is also brought to light in a recent set of videos made by BulkReefSupply. Week 18-22 go over lighting and it illustrated the downfalls of LEDs as a solo light source. If i had the extra money i would buy the ATI powermod, or a comparable. And a good, decent priced LED/T5 combo fixture along with an all in one digital 24/7 water tester are on my most desired list.
I do have a separate frag tank ran by leds only where its non colonies. I run chinese blackbox, before mars aqua, they are tao tronic full spectrums. Also i am running the kessil ap700 knock offs. the 169w chinese cob lights that im not overly fond of due to they are overly white. both grow frags just fine as long as my chemistry is spot on.
