Lighting

[ecuzco18]

Hi guys, I am a young student from Pritzker College Prep. My teacher is building a reef tank and needs our help to successfully accomplish this. He purchased LED lights for the reef tank. I wanted to know what type of organism can survive with LED lights?

 

[MurphyLong]

Hi guys, I am a young student from Pritzker College Prep. My teacher is building a reef tank and needs our help to successfully accomplish this. He purchased LED lights for the reef tank. I wanted to know what type of organism can survive with LED lights?

It depends on the LED being used. What kind of wattage are you talking about? I use a fixture with 3w LED's, and there are 55 LEDs. I can keep just about any kind of coral. Fish don't need specific lighting.

Let's start here:

Tell me what you have, like tank size and what kind of lights, and what you wanna keep in the tank. We'll go from there.

 

[Floyd79]

It really depends on the leds.

The spectrum is important.
What Kelvin rating is the leds?
10,000k -20,000k is for corals
6000-7000k is for plants.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Hi guys, I am a young student from Pritzker College Prep. My teacher is building a reef tank and needs our help to successfully accomplish this. He purchased LED lights for the reef tank. I wanted to know what type of organism can survive with LED lights?

Fish, snails, crabs, shrimp, sea cucumbers, sea stars can all survive with any basic led aquarium fixture. They don't need super strong leds.

98% of all corals, anemones and macro algae all need the better, more intense led fixture that uses 3 watt or 5 watt leds... unless the tank is very shallow (less than 16" deep).

Tell us how deep the tank is and what brand of led fixture it has and we can probably offer better help.

Good luck and have fun with it.