Finally got around to throwing up my led vs halide setup.
So my wonderful fiancee allowed me to setup a 4x2x1 frag tank in the lounge room ! shes a legend, its a trade as she has two guinea pigs in the lounge. anyway on with the setup.
My aim is to run frags under different lighting and review the results after a year, depending if one type takes a turn for the worse or shows no promise. Corals are mirrored so they can be compared.
Im running a 150w 14k SMG halide from guppies (in shop fitter fitting with UV glass added) vs a 120w full spectrum ebay led, the 120w is pulling about 50w from the wall, its sitting too close to the corals to run at full power. I have also pulled off the lenses from the ebay unit, After running leds for 5 years or so, I'm convinced wide angle and lots of coverage is best, no spotlighting and nice mix of color.
The tank shares my sump with my main tank, I have the flow in the tank setup fairly equal as this could impact on results.
Running undetectable No3 and No4, on salifert kits anyway, need to get myself a hanna. Vinegar dosing keeps these at zero and i run a fairly small skimmer- alk at 7 to 8, some say this is the best when dosing vingar, calc is around 420, mag 1350. Temp around 24.5 to 26. on max swing. I dose amino as my readings are so low.
As you can see the LED unit is sitting right on the glass, as i have no lenses i get no spotlighting with this unit. The halide is about 10" off the water. Frags disks are upside down, long story no frag rack, ill glue some on the bottom when they get bigger and rack them up.
This is the halide side, some frags have come from my main tank (halide - T5) and some from under my led tank. few brown corals from bargain bin at local LFS.
[/URL]
and the LED side - this setup has been up for a few weeks, the LED side is looking much nicer at this stage,and not just because its under 20k lighting, if i move the coral under halide you can see its far more colourful from being under led, so the led is really driving pigmentation on certain corals.
[/URL]
As you can see im going all in cheap here, SMG globes are not the bottom of the barrel but not far off, tempted to throw a 10k Ushio in. But as Im also pitching this against a cheap ebay unit it kinda makes some sense.
So Ive had some of these corals under the LED for a few months, and I have to say im pretty impressed with this ebay unit, i was so skeptical to start with, but my bargain basement acro I picked up has turned electric blue from a terrible brown, I also fragged a bit off and threw it in my main tank, it actually just stayed brown with tiny blue tips, but it grew twice as fast. Just give you an idea, i have a shot of of the coral under natural sunlight which actually shows up pink, it just looks incredible under natural sunlight, i was moving a small frag tank around and the afternoon sun caught it, was worth taking a shot. shows how far off our 14 lighting is at producing true colour, well 6500k colour.
hope you enjoy the ride, Im going to do a range of close shots of each coral an see how we go.
a quick shot of my main tank, 3x2x2 running for a few years, recently under T5 and halide, DIY led before that. Yep i know tang is now asking for bigger tank, dont worry buddy i hear ya!
