Attempt to color up SPS under LED
- Thread starter Posseidon
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bebereef
New member
Could you point me to a specific section?
kc350twin
New member
Good thread so far. I was linked to it by a thread in the Ecotech sponsor forums. It's funny how some people can blast there corals with light and others cannot. I to have been struggling with SPS colors since hanging 2 Radion pros over my cube. It is a bit of over kill but it's for the coverage and shadowing that I wanted 2.
In my tank I cannot take the PAR at the top over 200ish or sps start to get pale. This means my MAX intensity of the lights are only 35%. The tank looks dim compared to the other light sources I've had. I also run my my white,green,and red LEDs very low now and things are retaining good colors. Hopefully I have found my sweet spot but man it's been a tough road to go down. The temptation for returning to T5's or Halides is high.
Keep up the good work on logging and keeping us informed of your progress.
In my tank I cannot take the PAR at the top over 200ish or sps start to get pale. This means my MAX intensity of the lights are only 35%. The tank looks dim compared to the other light sources I've had. I also run my my white,green,and red LEDs very low now and things are retaining good colors. Hopefully I have found my sweet spot but man it's been a tough road to go down. The temptation for returning to T5's or Halides is high.
Keep up the good work on logging and keeping us informed of your progress.
erndog1001
Premium Member
Hmmmm... How far above the water?
kc350twin
New member
asylumdown
New member
The common thread I'm seeing in this, er, thread, is a lot of very small frags in relatively new tanks.
I've been running radions over my 275 since I set it up in April of 2012, and I'd say my growth and colour are fantastic, however 'success' for me has been equal measure getting a) enough coral b) corals that specifically look great under my lights and c) a mature, very stable system.
I have some corals, specifically wild Walt Smith corals, that took 3 months to a year to figure out what colour they wanted to be under my lights and start growing. I have other corals that had been in captivity for much longer that adapted much faster, and I have other corals still that started to grow right away but didn't really reach their true colour potential until months after I got them. The other thing that seems to have really helped - grossly over feeding and neglecting my tank for 4 months. I've been running biopellets since day one and have an incredibly low bioload until March or April of this year, only really hitting 'medium' bioload status around June. Between July and October, when I hardly had enough time to do water changes, let alone change filter socks or GFO, my tank grew more than it had in the past year combined, and the colours just popped.
Based on nearly 2 years experience with the LEDs now I would say that judging the performance of any LED system based on a few very small frags of only a few kinds of corals under the lights for at most a couple of months is in no way a fair analysis of their long term potential.
For example:
October, 2012 (an out of control algae problem wasn't helping anything. Note the bleached out coral on the top of the left rock structure, it had been in the tank for 3 months by that point and generally looked like crap)
October, 2013 (that coral I noted from the above picture is so vibrant you could probably see it from space, it's also the size of a dinner plate now)
and some close up under water shots. Some of these shots were taken with the lights at different blends of diode colours, so they're not all the same colour temp.
I've been running radions over my 275 since I set it up in April of 2012, and I'd say my growth and colour are fantastic, however 'success' for me has been equal measure getting a) enough coral b) corals that specifically look great under my lights and c) a mature, very stable system.
I have some corals, specifically wild Walt Smith corals, that took 3 months to a year to figure out what colour they wanted to be under my lights and start growing. I have other corals that had been in captivity for much longer that adapted much faster, and I have other corals still that started to grow right away but didn't really reach their true colour potential until months after I got them. The other thing that seems to have really helped - grossly over feeding and neglecting my tank for 4 months. I've been running biopellets since day one and have an incredibly low bioload until March or April of this year, only really hitting 'medium' bioload status around June. Between July and October, when I hardly had enough time to do water changes, let alone change filter socks or GFO, my tank grew more than it had in the past year combined, and the colours just popped.
Based on nearly 2 years experience with the LEDs now I would say that judging the performance of any LED system based on a few very small frags of only a few kinds of corals under the lights for at most a couple of months is in no way a fair analysis of their long term potential.
For example:
October, 2012 (an out of control algae problem wasn't helping anything. Note the bleached out coral on the top of the left rock structure, it had been in the tank for 3 months by that point and generally looked like crap)
October, 2013 (that coral I noted from the above picture is so vibrant you could probably see it from space, it's also the size of a dinner plate now)
and some close up under water shots. Some of these shots were taken with the lights at different blends of diode colours, so they're not all the same colour temp.
asylumdown
New member
and a couple more
Blues turned off completely:
And a comparison of the same coral under mostly blue/RB and only whites:
[URL=http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/asylumdown/media/P1010050_zps4d35c9a6.jpg.html]
Blues turned off completely:
And a comparison of the same coral under mostly blue/RB and only whites:
[URL=http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/asylumdown/media/P1010050_zps4d35c9a6.jpg.html]
The problem is that most of the discussions on forums are done by fairly new hobbyists to share and learn, because they are all so excited by this fascinating hobby. Well... experienced reefers have also done that in their initial phase too and given plenty of hours per day for years. And then, when they know how to run the tanks nicely on their own, not many tend to spend time in forums with the same enthusiasm. I'm not saying about 'all' seasoned reefers but 'most of them'. But those who return create new successful reefers 
Which in turn, helps to come up with new ideas and knowledge.
Point taken with regards to observation period to judge success. I knew that coloring up of SPS could be time consuming, but didn't how long to wait to see if its progressing.
And awesome tank!!
Any idea how dirty did the water go between July and October? Did you take any readings for Nitrates or Phosphates during that time?
Appreciate if you could share any other moves taken to acheive such beautiful colors.
I've heard that GFO can remove trace elements from the water. Do you dose any?
How about Dissolved Organics? Do you run Activated Carbon? Do you think having some Dissolved Organics helps OR should we only try to have small readings of Nitrates and Phosphates and keep Dissolved Organics out?
Any particular combo/intensity of light that helped?
Now that you accidentally(and fortunately) got amazing colors during the neglected months, how do you manage to keep them colored and happy? What maintenance changes did you make? Like water change frequency, amount of Biopellets in reactor, frequency of GFO change, feeding etc.
Sorry for popping many questions, but there are many eager reefers that need knowledge from successful reefers like you.
Which in turn, helps to come up with new ideas and knowledge. Point taken with regards to observation period to judge success. I knew that coloring up of SPS could be time consuming, but didn't how long to wait to see if its progressing.
And awesome tank!!
Any idea how dirty did the water go between July and October? Did you take any readings for Nitrates or Phosphates during that time?
Appreciate if you could share any other moves taken to acheive such beautiful colors.
I've heard that GFO can remove trace elements from the water. Do you dose any?
How about Dissolved Organics? Do you run Activated Carbon? Do you think having some Dissolved Organics helps OR should we only try to have small readings of Nitrates and Phosphates and keep Dissolved Organics out?
Any particular combo/intensity of light that helped?
Now that you accidentally(and fortunately) got amazing colors during the neglected months, how do you manage to keep them colored and happy? What maintenance changes did you make? Like water change frequency, amount of Biopellets in reactor, frequency of GFO change, feeding etc.
Sorry for popping many questions, but there are many eager reefers that need knowledge from successful reefers like you.
Another motivation. Here's a LED lit, Tank Of The Month, Sep 2013.
http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/137-tank-of-the-month
http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/137-tank-of-the-month
asylumdown
New member
The problem is that most of the discussions on forums are done by fairly new hobbyists to share and learn, because they are all so excited by this fascinating hobby. Well... experienced reefers have also done that in their initial phase too and given plenty of hours per day for years. And then, when they know how to run the tanks nicely on their own, not many tend to spend time in forums with the same enthusiasm. I'm not saying about 'all' seasoned reefers but 'most of them'. But those who return create new successful reefers
Point taken with regards to observation period to judge success. I knew that coloring up of SPS could be time consuming, but didn't how long to wait to see if its progressing.
And awesome tank!!
Any idea how dirty did the water go between July and October? Did you take any readings for Nitrates or Phosphates during that time?
Nope, I didn't even check my alk or calcium for that stretch, I relied on it having thankfully been pretty stable by the time I had to start ignoring it. I definitely did notice that as soon as I went back to changing my GFO regularly my colours paled a little and growth slowed down. I also developed a bit of a cyano problem in that period that is a better indicator of when the GFO is exhausted than a test kit of phosphate. I keep getting a zero reading, but around 3 weeks after changing the GFO cyano growth will suddenly pick up aggressively
Appreciate if you could share any other moves taken to acheive such beautiful colors.
Honestly I think it was just time and stability. It's a pretty big tank, and I don't mess with it very often. I've used the same chemicals to maintain the major ions since the start (anhydrous calcium chloride, baking soda, and sachem's reef advantage magnesium), I've never changed the lights and I very rarely change my light program. In the summer the tank ran a bit hotter than I would normally be comfortable with, hitting 27 degrees C a couple days a week when the AC couldn't keep up with the heat wave we had here, but if anything that just made things grow faster
I've heard that GFO can remove trace elements from the water. Do you dose any?
Nope. But I use H2Ocean salt and when I do do water changes, I do relatively large water changes. 50 gallons at a time.
How about Dissolved Organics? Do you run Activated Carbon? Do you think having some Dissolved Organics helps OR should we only try to have small readings of Nitrates and Phosphates and keep Dissolved Organics out?
I don't run carbon no. I used it once temporarily when I dosed flatworm exit to take out a plague of red flatworms, but that was it. I do run biopellets and have from the beginning, but there was a long time where my tank probably didn't have enough of a bioload to justify them and my corals were very pale and grew very slowly. In late July of last year I removed all my fish to treat for ich and fallowed the display. It's a long story but for about 5 weeks of that my display also had no form of nutrient export (no skimmer and I wasn't doing water changes) and yet I kept feeding the display with an auto-feeder, that's where the algae in the Oct. 2012 pic came from. I tried a couple of different things to cure my fish of ich that didn't work, so they were in QT longer than normal and right before they were supposed to go back in there was a malfunction with the QT system and I lost every single fish. So from basically August until December my tank was fish less, and after that 5 weeks wrecking the display I started skimming and doing water changes again and very rapidly all algae growth of any kind utterly ceased. I didn't have to squeegee my glass for weeks at a time and coralline stopped growing. The corals were really pale and they grew really slowly too. I started really building up the bioload in January of this year, and added 8 anthias around... the spring sometime, which meant adding auto-feeders to feed the tank dry food twice a day and a healthy dump of frozen by hand every evening. That's when the corals really started to go bananas, but it's also when I started having problems with cyano, a bit of an issue with dinos (though it's mild enough that it just looks like diatoms), and an epic case of bubble algae, so I'm still searching for the happy median
Any particular combo/intensity of light that helped?
For the first 6 months I really didn't like my lights, but I figured out after I messed something up and had to re-program them from scratch that what I didn't like was my program. The program I've been using for the last year and a bit is much better, so finding the 'right' program is pretty critical. My first attempt looked really flat and bland, and a realized that was because while the pre-sets I chose were OK, the way the light transited between them - which was basically most of the day - didn't look very good.
Now that you accidentally(and fortunately) got amazing colors during the neglected months, how do you manage to keep them colored and happy? What maintenance changes did you make? Like water change frequency, amount of Biopellets in reactor, frequency of GFO change, feeding etc.
I'm using a recirculating biopellet reactor with about 1.5 litres of pellets that I top up every 4-6 months. It's probably a lot more pellets than some other people would run, and it was for sure way too much when there was no fish in there, but it's worked for me thus far and I try not to mess with it. I've been toying with the idea of taking them offline just to see what happens to the cyano in the tank, but it's been my experience that the consequences of any change in a tank's basic systems can take months to play out, and even more months to recover from if something goes wrong, so I'm very hesitant. I've been trying to change my GFO less often than I used to because that really seems to make an immediate and negative impact, literally the day after I change it the corals seem paler. That might just be me seeing something that isn't there, but I still see it. The downside to that is cyano keeps getting the upper hand. I've been toying with the idea of dosing with red slime remover just to see if I can kill it for good, but I'm not sure what that will do to my pellet reactor. I'm back to changing water once every 10 days or so, but I've had some issues recently with calcium and alk values getting out of whack that I'm anticipating is going to have some impact on how fast things grow for the next couple of months. I have a long horn cowfish that grew up very quickly and now requires an enormous amount of food, I'd say in the past 3 months I've been feeding 2 to 3 times what I was feeding in June, so I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the problems I've been seeing with cyano is my tank adjusting to a new nutrient regime, and I'm either on the cusp of it getting much worse, or levelling out in some way. Every time I make some sort of a change it takes at least 3 months for the full implications of that change to play out, and sometimes even longer. That might be a function of how big this tank is, but I think that's probably true of smaller systems as well. What I have noticed is that SPS hate change, and they take a long time to completely forgive you for it.
Sorry for popping many questions, but there are many eager reefers that need knowledge from successful reefers like you. No problem! The most success I had with my tank was when the fish I have now were smaller, and I had less of them, so if your goal is colourful SPS that grow fast and your tank also looks 'clean', I think a big part of the challenge is finding the right balance of nutrient export systems, the number of food hungry vertebrates and corals . I'd like to get rid of at least 5 of my fish now that everyone has pretty much grown up
That's very detailed. Thanks
I've used Chemiclean to fight Cyanos and it did not disturb the Biopellets function. I've documented that on another thread:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2316888
I've used Chemiclean to fight Cyanos and it did not disturb the Biopellets function. I've documented that on another thread:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2316888
mussel and hate
New member
That looks like a montipora eating nudibranch in the first photo.
asylumdown
New member
Nearing 3 years with Gen 1 radions. Recently lost lots of coral because I'm dummy and forgot all the basics of water chemistry, also a disastrous home renovation, but other than some holes in the reef, things are starting to look back up. Keep in mind iPhones still suuuuuuuuck at taking pictures of LED lit tanks, so these images are pretty washed out compared to real life.
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