Lighting cycles

[theyangman]

I have a 220 gallon SPS tank and I have been playing with my lights with some detrimental effects lately.

I have two Maxspect Razor 160 watt 16,000k 27"

I bought them and set them up on preset #1 for a few months. I was hoping to fine tune them a little better as I was finding that I lost a few SPS due to bleaching and the more I researched the more I found that Channel A (White) at 100% is pretty darn powerful so barring me moving everything lower in my tank I decided to play with my programmable settings a little.

So here is what I USED to use for settings (Preset #1)

I have now tuned it to:

Now, do SPS actually require a "ramp up" period or can the lights litterally go from on to off with no issues? I was thinking of running a steady cycle maybe every 4 hours. Whites on at say 65-75% then blues at 100% then repeat. Good or bad?

 

[jda]

No. My lights are on at 2-3 and off at 10-11. Cheap light time. The ramp up, dusk/dawn, etc. is for the reefer, not the coral.

 

[theyangman]

So your corals only snag 2 hours of max light / day?

 

[jerpa]

So your corals only snag 2 hours of max light / day?

The light is on from 2-3 until 10-11. It varies because cheap timers often won't keep the proper time and sometimes turn on late.

Ramping up and down is not necessary as evidenced by the years of success T5 and MH users have had. It can influence fish behavior and spawning.

 

[theyangman]

Ohhhh... lol that makes way more sense. Roughly 7-9 hours a day. Lol

 

[dvanacker]

Hey Tony. Do you have a par meter. That would help in deciding how long to make your daylight photoperiod. The higher the par the less time you could use as day.

 

[Bpb]

For my plain old t5s I run 9 hours blues, with 7 hours full intensity in the middle. 1 hour ramp up then down as you can see. Mainly because I like how the tank looks with pure blue. But not all the time. That will give me a headache.