mhucasey
Acros & wieners, oh my!
LEDs are expensive, so getting the proper amount for coverage costs more money than most reefers consider reasonable. I'll buy that. I've been hearing that LEDs haven't been out long enough for reef tanks to develop under them for 3 years now. It doesn't take that long to grow a reef tank, so I don't buy that.I'm not sure exactly what your point is here? If only one person on the planet has produced an amazing tank grown by LEDs then it proves LEDs work. I think there's also a couple of reasons for this, the first is cost; there's no doubt that MH is the cheap option for lighting reef systems, the initial setup of using good quality LEDs can be very expensive, so you'd assume that more tanks are lit with MH for this reason.
Secondly although LED technology has been around for about 10 years, I'd say that it's only in the last 3 years or so that we've seen a real growth in LED technology capable of growing SPS at a decent rate.
I was using AI sols 5 years ago on a 55 and unless I put 8 of them over the tank I wasn't going to get sufficient lighting for Acropora.
Now on a 150 I had 3 AI Hydra52s and was getting good Acropora growth directly under the lights, but the poor spread of the lights meant I needed more fixtures.
So the reason you've only seen a handful of amazing LED grown tanks is probably because 1. The initial cost means less people take this option, especially on larger tanks, 2. It takes time to grow out an amazing reef tank and the better LED units have only really been out 3 or 4 years, and 3. You have to have your settings correctly dialed in with LEDs, as we've seen from this thread many people just give up and go crawling back to MH, then come on here stating LEDs don't work instead of persevering and researching the right settings.
Why should reef keepers be forced to "perservere" tweaking spectrum and researching settings on a light fixture that costs more than existing technologies? If it was cheaper that would make sense, but for most technology when you pay more you should get ease of use in that cost.