CAD Lights 45g Shallow

jrpdriver

jrpdriver

Active member
Howdy

I have been in the hobby for over 18 years and have had a number of different systems over the years, but keeping sps is where my passion lies. I currently have 720g and 50g sps tanks, both are doing well but are out of real estate, so I decided to start another tank that will be dedicated to growing out frags of my collector pieces.

System Specs

CAD lights low iron tank 36" x 24" x 12"
Hydra 52 HD lights
Vertex Omega 130 skimmer
Koralin Calcium Reactor
Gyre 130 circulation pump
Smart ATO and Digital Aquatics Reefkeeper Lite Controller

So far I have assembled the system, used Marco cement and dry rock to aquascape and have been adding bacteria to the system for a little over a week now.
 
Here is how the system sits now


I mounted the lights to drawer rails so I could move the lights out of the way, but after installing everything I realized it was unnecessary as their is plenty of room to work

 
a closeup of the rockwork, can't really see the depth without any corals in place



The gyre moves a ton of water, I am really impressed with it so far

 
With the shallow dimension, I had hoped that I could use less light fixtures and mount them up high to get the coverage and intensity I needed for the 36" x 24" area. The results were perfect, most of the tank is getting 450-550 PAR with a few spots hitting over 600. Even the corners of the tank are getting 250

 
the plumbing CAD Lights included was good quality and very easy to install, the whole thing was plug and play with no modifications

 
Here are a lot of the frags waiting to go in, list includes:

Orange Passion
IceFire Echinata
Pro Corals Rainbow
Tinas Pink Orgasm
CJ Pinky
Tierra Del Fuego
Somewhere Over the Rainbow Milli
Strawberry Shortcake
Hawaiian Punch
RR Flaming Orchid
ASD Rainbow Milli
Bubblegum Milli

 
I owned three of those smart Atos and also loved them till I noticed the housing around the magnet cracking on one and basically exploded on another. Beware of those units cracking and putting rust into your tank. I had to throw all three of mine away. I would get rid of that and get a Tunze unit. You don't want to put all your very expensive SPS in that tank and have the cracked magnet leaching rust.
 
Excellent start to you new tank. I have the same tank and I love it. Looking forward to following along
 
Molly1414 said:
I owned three of those smart Atos and also loved them till I noticed the housing around the magnet cracking on one and basically exploded on another. Beware of those units cracking and putting rust into your tank. I had to throw all three of mine away. I would get rid of that and get a Tunze unit. You don't want to put all your very expensive SPS in that tank and have the cracked magnet leaching rust.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up, a little rust actually isn't as detrimental as a lot of people think but a lot can be bad. Rust from stainless steel is the worst, rust from magnets from what I've read, isn't bad at all.
 
Last edited:
cFloor said:
Excellent start to you new tank. I have the same tank and I love it. Looking forward to following along
Click to expand...

Thank you , that's cool, when did you get yours?

fishphi784 said:
Don't you have another tank w/ Radions? I would be interested to know which you prefer?
Click to expand...

Yeah I have a 50g using a Gen 1 Radion and Kessils and my 720 uses Maspexs....I can't common in preference on coral growth and coloration for obvious reasons but I am really liking the Hydra HD so far. I like being able to control from my phone and I really like being able to apply unused power to overdrive other channels, I'm expecting really good results but time will tell
 
I thoroughly enjoyed following the two threads for the 50G tank. So will be following this thread for sure.

I note that you are going all LED once again. I know from the photos that the coral colours at least on your other two tanks look great.

However, where I am very uncertain is the colours of the SPS when looking from the front: are the colours really that much worse than halide or T5 when viewing from the front when running LED's?

On your 50G for example you have a Kessil angled towards the front I think...does that help with colouring up the front/side of the coral facing the front glass?
 
sahin said:
I thoroughly enjoyed following the two threads for the 50G tank. So will be following this thread for sure.

I note that you are going all LED once again. I know from the photos that the coral colours at least on your other two tanks look great.

However, where I am very uncertain is the colours of the SPS when looking from the front: are the colours really that much worse than halide or T5 when viewing from the front when running LED's?

On your 50G for example you have a Kessil angled towards the front I think...does that help with colouring up the front/side of the coral facing the front glass?
Click to expand...


Thanks bud, the colors from the front look great in person, the issue, and reason for the addition of the Kessils, is to overcome shading. With the metal halide reflectors you have light coming down from a large area, usually around 16" x 16", but with the LED its coming from 4-6" diameter areas. So when you get corals growing up high they can block a good amount of the light. My hope with this set-up, is that because I am running the lights so high off the water, shading will not be an issue. I wouldn't be able to get away with this with a normal size tank because at more depth I wouldn't get the PAR I need.

So thats my long-winded way of saying that LED's produce the same color as MH or T5 when viewing from the side, but the issue with corals not looking as good from the side in established LED tanks is related to the size of the projection area and shading, not the type of light itself
 
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