Just got PAR sensor and multimeter am I doomed?
- Thread starter kissman
- Start date
sahin
Ultimate Reefer
The areas with 150+ PAR is perfectly fine. I have a Red Planet getting 120 PAR and it has lost the green, but the red colouration is very nice.
I had to find low PAR areas (ie 150 or less) for some deepwater SPS or they bleach.
If you buy one of the Reefbrite Royal Blue strips and add this to the front of your fixture you will boost the PAR by around 50 on most areas. And you will get nice pop too. - Thats if you really wanted to boost the pop and increase the PAR a little.
I had to find low PAR areas (ie 150 or less) for some deepwater SPS or they bleach.
If you buy one of the Reefbrite Royal Blue strips and add this to the front of your fixture you will boost the PAR by around 50 on most areas. And you will get nice pop too. - Thats if you really wanted to boost the pop and increase the PAR a little.
sahin
Ultimate Reefer
Exactly. And that is a very nice tank with very good colour.
Number 1 issue with SPS colour is water quality. Granted with better lighting you can get away with slightly less than ideal water quality and still get decent results.
When my water quality was excellent I could place brown out SPS at the bottom of my tank towards to back and they would still colour up. That was with around 150 or less PAR.
NeilFox
New member
Thanks for the info! ATI is not available here yet but I am hoping to see something in the future. What an interesting thread...
+1 - Agree 100%. I think we tend to get a little PAR hungry in this hobby, thinking more is always better.
I never had to battle pale colors when I ran a cheap Catalina T5 over my 90....color was nice and deep. Now, my tank looks silly with the fixture 5 feet above the tank, spilling light across the neighborhood.
sahin
Ultimate Reefer
I bought mine off ebay. Just typed in Acrylic rod etc. Loads of stuff available.
My Lights are about 12inches above the waterline.
FWIW, my LFS has a tank with 36inch height. The ATI Sunpower is suspended about 8inches above the waterline. The SPS at the bottom are just as nicely coloured as the ones nearer to the top. The tank is a jungle of SPS...so the SPS towards the bottom dont even get full unrestricted light falling on them because there are so many SPS above, branching this way and that way...but the colours on the SPS is just amazing.
Having measured the PAR levels for a few of my own tanks over the years (with metal halide, T5 and LED lighting) and having measured and mapped out the PAR levels for many other people, I can take a pretty good guess at PAR levels (especially for T5 lighting), so I estimate in my LFS tank, that the PAR levels some of the acros at the bottom of the tank cant be getting no more than 120 PAR, if even that.
It is because of their water quality that their acros are so nicely coloured. What I noticed was that the colours were nice and deep. Not pale at all.
