PAR Shootout! Seneye Reef Monitor v2 VS. Apogee MQ-510 Full Spectrum Underwater Meter

[Thor2j]

Not all do. Apogee is working through it now and figuring out which batches have an issue and would impact the SQ and MQ 510's. I've already reached out to them.

Edit: and fwiw mine seems to be doing just fine picking up all the spectrums and even the low nm violet/actinics.

Post #38 I linked to the BRS video. and just after the 9 minute mark he mentions how a portion of the 510's are reading lower then the original 200 series sensors. Mine is not having that issue as seen above.

I have one too and I talked to them as well. They also thought they may all be effected.

Sent from my SM-G935T using Tapatalk

 

[jason2459]

I have one too and I talked to them as well. They also thought they may all be effected.

Sent from my SM-G935T using Tapatalk

I can most definitively tell you the one I have does not read lower then the 200 series as seen above. Not sure what else to tell you other then when I talked to them a few days ago they said they were working hard on determining what batches are affected and BRS in their video also states a portion of them are effected.

 

[jason2459]

Going for a second day here with the readings and tracking but doing it differently. Yesterday I was basically glued to a screen of some type all day. I grabbed live readings and dropped lows as that's just fish swimming over head or something like a starfish crawling over top.

So, today I'm just going to take logged readings. Which is not actually the most accurate as they can grab those very lows and not smart enough to ignore it. The Apex logs more times through out the hour which is nice. The Seneye is only 2 times an hour. I wish it was more or gave the option to choose how many times an hour to log.

But so far it's as expected. So, the readings over all are lower then yesterdays due to not averaging out over time better and the Apex is still more then statistically lower consistently. Will still keep tracking and post results tonight.

 

[jason2459]

2nd day of tracking done. With the Apex logging every 10 minutes it definitely had the advantage to register a better number through the hour. The Seneye only logs twice an hour and if the first one was blocked a lot and reports an obviously low bogus number you just hope the 2nd report logged isn't the same.

That said, nothing much changed. As I mentioned earlier they both over all have lower numbers the. Yesterday as they don't average things properly throwing out obviously wrong numbers.

And through out even with the logging advantage the Apex PMK was reading much lower PAR numbers. Pretty much what I saw a couple days ago when first putting the PMK in the tank. About a PAR of 20 lower when looking at what was reported to the cloud.

 

[jason2459]

2nd day of tracking done. With the Apex logging every 10 minutes it definitely had the advantage to register a better number through the hour. The Seneye only logs twice an hour and if the first one was blocked a lot and reports an obviously low bogus number you just hope the 2nd report logged isn't the same. Being able to get on the local interface to get live readings is very valuable if wanting to get accurate PAR numbers plus it gives you the PUR which isn't on the seneye.me cloud yet.

That said, nothing much changed. As I mentioned earlier they both over all have lower numbers the. Yesterday as they don't average things properly throwing out obviously wrong numbers.

And through out even with the logging advantage the Apex PMK was reading much lower PAR numbers. Pretty much what I saw a couple days ago when first putting the PMK in the tank. About a PAR of 20 lower when looking at what was reported to the cloud.

 

[jason2459]

During peak times I think I can reliably depend on the PMK to be consistent and mentally add 20 to the PAR readings and use it for tracking. It seems to read close to the same values each day at the same time. So, it is precise just not accurate. But knowing that one can adjust. It also assumes my Seneye and MQ510 are closer to accurate. In comparing live readings the PMK was about 30 lower but I won't assume my Seneye and Apogee are perfectly accurate either.

I do like the hide away rock that Neptune provides and will keep it in the tank and I'll stick to my original plan with the Seneye in my overflow for backup monitoring to my Apex and run dry alert back there which would be a bad serario. Then pull it out and into the display periodically to track PAR, PUR, LUX.

 

[dragonxflare]

I read that for Kessil Lights, some par meters have issues getting the true number, is this true? I have the Kessil AP700, and it's hanging about 10" roughly above my tank at 25%.

Right under the LED, it was reading 2069 par (reasonable)

about about mid way into the tank (i have a Innovative marine 30l) it was reading about 105 par. At 25% for a short tank, 105 par seemed a bit low... maybe I am wrong. Am I crazy? Or does it seem inaccurate?

If I am wrong, does that mean I should be pushing this Ap700 harder, around 35-40% over this 30g tank?

Any suggestions would be great, just purchased the Seneye and just wanted to verify the accuracy of it

 

[Ron Reefman]

The Kessil isn't any different from any other led as far as getting a PAR reading.

The issue isn't the fixture, it's the PAR meter and the fact that they all are weak at reading blue/violet and near UV spectrum. Older Apogee meters (like mine) were off by roughly 10% for a good full spectrum white light because it isn't reading all the blue. I think newer meters are better, but still aren't perfect.

Your PAR of 105 is a bit low for only halfway down in the tank. I work to have 150 to 200 PAR at the lowest coral.

 

[oreo57]

There seems to be an "anomoly" (that most won't care about) that I am trying to figure out.
First some background:
http://www.apogeeinstruments.com/conversion-ppf-to-lux/

b4 there were "cheap" Par sensors there was the ability to at least estimate PAR using LUX.
mostly for fw, mostly white, or less punctated sources since the blue centric LED centric reef lighting had too high of an error.

Anyways as you can see from the above and this:
https://www.gigahertz-optik.de/en-us/product/msc15

The "conversion factor" was about 65-70 .. So LUX divided by 70 = PAR.


NOW the problem is that the Seneye "conversion factor" is 37
?????
BUT according to the 2 Apogee sensors PAR is the accurate one.
This implies the Seneye way underestimates LUX (again mostly in white LED's) by a factor of about 2....
Again reef lighting and LUX is a bit pointless but in this data and some for freshwater lighting the conversion factor is consistently about 36.

so the point is.. Is LUX for the Seneye that far off??

Anyone have both a Seneye and a typical LUX meter to "shoot numbers" on a white channel?

Seneye is not cosine corrected (and stated by them as not) but should not impact this much..

an academic issue mostly but I'm curious.

 

[dragonxflare]

The Kessil isn't any different from any other led as far as getting a PAR reading.

The issue isn't the fixture, it's the PAR meter and the fact that they all are weak at reading blue/violet and near UV spectrum. Older Apogee meters (like mine) were off by roughly 10% for a good full spectrum white light because it isn't reading all the blue. I think newer meters are better, but still aren't perfect.

Your PAR of 105 is a bit low for only halfway down in the tank. I work to have 150 to 200 PAR at the lowest coral.

Thanks. I currently have it at 25%, and will be upping it to 30% to see how the corals react, then slowly raise it higher to hit around 200 ish par.

 

[oreo57]

bump

 

[Brock0019]

Tagging along as I was thinking of getting a seneye to measure this

 

[iced98lx]

Older Apogee meters (like mine) were off by roughly 10% for a good full spectrum white light because it isn't reading all the blue.

I keep seeing this repeated and to me we could have some additional clarification. The meters (and the blue spectrum that they read slightly low on) are only part of the story. Those meters also read HIGH in a significant part of the spectrum that full spectrum lights output. Unless you're measuring solo 420nm LED's the final number reading out may not be all that inaccurate as many times the slightly optimistic area of the response curve makes up for the slightly under reported area:

While the area below 450 is under reported, note that everything from 450 up is over reported boosting the number. This is what led to BRS suggesting that the 2xx and 5xx meters were both roughly on par (pun intended) with a meter that had a much more accurate response curve as far as final numbers in somewhat full spectrum lights.

Not ideal when you can vary the amount of light under the 450nm point like on modern fixtures but in the end it's often enough of a wash to make meter's like yours pretty accurate for a "tuning" type number. The only thing we shouldn't be doing is turning everything but the blues off and trying to compare that number to accurate meters imho.

my 2cents, anyway.

 

[Thor2j]

I keep seeing this repeated and to me we could have some additional clarification. The meters (and the blue spectrum that they read slightly low on) are only part of the story. Those meters also read HIGH in a significant part of the spectrum that full spectrum lights output. Unless you're measuring solo 420nm LED's the final number reading out may not be all that inaccurate as many times the slightly optimistic area of the response curve makes up for the slightly under reported area:

While the area below 450 is under reported, note that everything from 450 up is over reported boosting the number. This is what led to BRS suggesting that the 2xx and 5xx meters were both roughly on par (pun intended) with a meter that had a much more accurate response curve as far as final numbers in somewhat full spectrum lights.

Not ideal when you can vary the amount of light under the 450nm point like on modern fixtures but in the end it's often enough of a wash to make meter's like yours pretty accurate for a "tuning" type number. The only thing we shouldn't be doing is turning everything but the blues off and trying to compare that number to accurate meters imho.

my 2cents, anyway.

The 500 has much better ability below the 450 curve as I'm sure u are aware. The rest where it's over is less then 10% which is plenty good for reef hobbyists.

Sent from my SM-G935T using Tapatalk

 

[jason2459]

In practical use the Apex PMK I used above is the 200 series shown in that graph. The seneye and 500 series seemed to do much better across the board with all channels on and with individual channels regardless of what that relative response of photons chart shows.

 

[jason2459]

But with that said I still have my PMK in the tank and it is consistent which is perfectly useful for tracking rises and drops in par and comparing before and after when doing an increase in intensity.

And being that they all seemed fairly consistent and the deviation between the PMK and the seneye/500 was consistent I feel confident in translating the numbers in my head of the PMK to what the seneye or the 500 would read.

And being Apex integrated I have an alert setup if it spikes to high like maybe someone found the remote to the lights and set them to a super high setting frying the corals.