Opinion on Kessil A360W-E Controller settings

[greg683x]

Hey all I have two Kessil A360W-E sitting over top of my 90 gallon soon to be reef tank. All I have right now in the tank, coral wise, is a small zoanthid colony and also a small orange montipora frag that I have sitting about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom. I plan on moving him up closer to the top once I feel hes acclimated

After doing some reading Im wondering if I need to show more blue during the better part of the day and if my intensity is too high. Right now I have both my lights sitting just over 8" from the water. My lights come on at 9am and these are my set points.

9am - 5% color/10% intensity
10am - 40% color/ 55% intensity
Noon - 80% color/75% intensity
7pm - 80% color/ 70% intensity
8pm 40% color/ 55% intensity
9pm - everything off.

Im looking for some feedback, whats everyone elses settings, do I need more color and less intensity? Or the opposite? Too long of a photo period? Im eventually gonna try and keep a lot of SPS in this tank so id like to get the lights right now before burning money away. The tank is very 'white' during the better part of the day so Im wondering if I need to make it more blue. The zoas and the monti look so great when the lights are on the blue ends of the day, but its also unnatural looking, so whats the happy medium?

Thanks all for the input!

 

[sixpackgarage]

Just be aware that when you push that much white (80%) PAR goes up A LOT. I'd back off on it maybe go 50% instead of 80% unless you have a good reason to have that much white. I just about bleached my torch coral when I switched from my AP700 back to my A360WE with too much white.

 

[greg683x]

Just be aware that when you push that much white (80%) PAR goes up A LOT. I'd back off on it maybe go 50% instead of 80% unless you have a good reason to have that much white. I just about bleached my torch coral when I switched from my AP700 back to my A360WE with too much white.

would you keep the intensity at around 50% too, making color 50% and intensity 50% at peak hours? or keep the intensity peaked at around 75% for the day and just drop the color to 50%?

How high are your lights above your tank?

 

[Brieninsac]

That seems a little too bright to me. I'd suggest doing a 10-day acclimation starting at 25% up to 50%. I used to run my lights higher and lost a lot of corals. These lights are deceivingly bright.

Here's my schedule FWIW.
7am 20% color/15% intensity
9am 30% color/40% intensity
12pm 60% color/50% intensity
3pm 60% color/50% intensity
5pm 30% color/40% intensity
9pm 0% color/0% intensity

 

[greg683x]

That seems a little too bright to me. I'd suggest doing a 10-day acclimation starting at 25% up to 50%. I used to run my lights higher and lost a lot of corals. These lights are deceivingly bright.

Here's my schedule FWIW.
7am 20% color/15% intensity
9am 30% color/40% intensity
12pm 60% color/50% intensity
3pm 60% color/50% intensity
5pm 30% color/40% intensity
9pm 0% color/0% intensity

Thanks for the reply. How high are your lights above the water?

 

[slief]

That seems a little too bright to me. I'd suggest doing a 10-day acclimation starting at 25% up to 50%. I used to run my lights higher and lost a lot of corals. These lights are deceivingly bright.

Here's my schedule FWIW.
7am 20% color/15% intensity
9am 30% color/40% intensity
12pm 60% color/50% intensity
3pm 60% color/50% intensity
5pm 30% color/40% intensity
9pm 0% color/0% intensity

10 day acclimation from 25-50% is WAY WAY WAY to fast!!! Having run Kessil 360WE's for over a year and a half with great success and having run LED's for over 5 years now, you need to take it slow with the increase. 5-10% a month is what I recommend and only raising the intensity a little bit once a week. A bump of 2% a week is relatively safe. That way, if you see any adverse reaction from the corals, you can back off 2-4% without frying them. Jumping from 25-50% over the course of 10 days is a sure fire way to bleach if not kill your corals.

That's said, as has been mentioned, 80% is too much color and too much white. Corals get most of the photosynthetic radiation from the 420nm-460nm spectrum which is the blue spectrum. 60-70% color is all that's needed and anymore than 75% can be counterproductive when it comes to SPS. I would start at 40-50% intensity and 60% color and leave it there for a few weeks or more and see how the corals respond. If they seem to be doing well, bump the intestinsity around 2% once a week and watch the corals closely. If they stop responding well, back off 4% and reevaluate. There should be no reason to exceed 80% intensity with the Kessils. I have my 360's 8" off the water and Max at 80% intensity and my SPS, LPS and soft corals all grow like weeds. I migrated from other LED's and was able to match par but I actually started with the Kessils at a much lower intensity and took months to work my way up to where I have them now. You need to take it slow with these lights. They are much more powerful than meets the eye. They are extremely strong in the 420-460nm range and that range doesn't show well on a par meter nor does it appear bright to the eyes but don't let that deceive you. They are MUCH more powerful than people realize and too much intensity is the number one reason people don't have great success with these lights. They don't take it slow enough and end up either bleaching or worse, killing their corals as a result. Corals will not die from too low an intensity for a short amount of time or even weeks. They can however be killed in a matter of days from too much intensity.

 

[minus9]

10 day acclimation from 25-50% is WAY WAY WAY to fast!!! Having run Kessil 360WE's for over a year and a half with great success and having run LED's for over 5 years now, you need to take it slow with the increase. 5-10% a month is what I recommend and only raising the intensity a little bit once a week. A bump of 2% a week is relatively safe. That way, if you see any adverse reaction from the corals, you can back off 2-4% without frying them. Jumping from 25-50% over the course of 10 days is a sure fire way to bleach if not kill your corals.

That's said, as has been mentioned, 80% is too much color and too much white. Corals get most of the photosynthetic radiation from the 420nm-460nm spectrum which is the blue spectrum. 60-70% color is all that's needed and anymore than 75% can be counterproductive when it comes to SPS. I would start at 40-50% intensity and 60% color and leave it there for a few weeks or more and see how the corals respond. If they seem to be doing well, bump the intestinsity around 2% once a week and watch the corals closely. If they stop responding well, back off 4% and reevaluate. There should be no reason to exceed 80% intensity with the Kessils. I have my 360's 8" off the water and Max at 80% intensity and my SPS, LPS and soft corals all grow like weeds. I migrated from other LED's and was able to match par but I actually started with the Kessils at a much lower intensity and took months to work my way up to where I have them now. You need to take it slow with these lights. They are much more powerful than meets the eye. They are extremely strong in the 420-460nm range and that range doesn't show well on a par meter nor does it appear bright to the eyes but don't let that deceive you. They are MUCH more powerful than people realize and too much intensity is the number one reason people don't have great success with these lights. They don't take it slow enough and end up either bleaching or worse, killing their corals as a result. Corals will not die from too low an intensity for a short amount of time or even weeks. They can however be killed in a matter of days from too much intensity.

Exactly! The key with kessil's is patience. Start low and SLOWLY increase the intensity. Too many people dismiss these lights saying they don't grow coral, and start to increase the intensity too rapidly and that's when things go wrong, quickly. These lights are very efficient and penetrate the water column quite well. I run two 160's on a 12hr cycle over a 22g. I ramp up for 3hrs, then hold peak for 6hrs, then ramp back down for 3hrs. I'm peaking at 65% with a mid day peak of 70% half way during the peak period. Colour goes from 0% to 30%, holds, following the peak hours, then back down to 0%. I'm having great success with this regime and I'm slowly increasing the intensity once a month, but I'm doing it very slowly. I have the Seneye reef with par meter, which also reads pur, which is what we really should pay attention to. Having the colour set above 50%-60% makes the light less efficient and the pur level drops (but not by too much, which is why these lights are great), but below 50% and the pur % increases. Having the color setting at 30% increases pur from 5% to 8% more than 50% colour. At 30% colour, I'm getting a pur % of 79%-82%, at 50% colour, I'm getting a pur % of 74%.
Sorry to ramble on, but these lights work, but you have to know how to use them. Slow and steady wins the race. Nothing good happens fast in the hobby, but if you're patient, you'll see beautiful things happen (grow). Take it slow, observe and be patient.

 

[Zalick]

10 day acclimation from 25-50% is WAY WAY WAY to fast!!! ..... Jumping from 25-50% over the course of 10 days is a sure fire way to bleach if not kill your corals.

Scott - How do you acclimate new corals to your lights if they came from a MH or T5 tank?

 

[Forgiven1973]

How do you acclimate new corals to your lights if they came from a MH or T5 tank or even another LED

 

[slief]

Scott - How do you acclimate new corals to your lights if they came from a MH or T5 tank?

Sorry I missed this question. My years late reply is below.

How do you acclimate new corals to your lights if they came from a MH or T5 tank or even another LED

I take par readings of the original lights at various levels in the tank. Then try to set the color on the new lights to about the same as the originals (visually speaking). I always try to set the lights up side by side when doing the migration to get the color right. I set the intensity about 10% less par than the originals. Then increase the intensity on the LED’s 2% a week until I see the corals respond adversely at which point I will back off 4% for a few weeks and then increase a bit more. I generally will stop at around 80% intenstiy or in some cases less depending on how the corals do. There is a point of diminishing returns which I have learned from experience and you usually never need to get anywhere near 100% with these lights or any of the other high end fixtures.