Too Much or Too Little Light?

dismayed

New member
I've been beefing up the amount of coral in my tank and I'm noticing that some of it is really lightening up in color and I am concerned. Mushrooms and the candy cane seem to be maintaining their colors fine, but my frogspawns and hammers are turning lighter and lighter in color. Most were originally green and are now very light green. One was originally purple and is now transitioning to green.

I'm thinking maybe the issue is lighting. Right now in my 90 gallon tank I have 4 x 54 watt Guessemann PowerChrome T5s that I run 8 hours a day. (This comes out to an average of 2.4 watts/gallon).

I'm thinking maybe I should be running them closer to 10 hours, but a local fish store says they are thinking maybe the lighting in my tank is too intense. I look in my coral books and it seems like frogspawns like a range of brightness, some of it pretty bright so this seems odd to me.

I have no idea how to come to such a conclusion without trial and error but just thought I'd ask for some second opinions? Any good indications of too much or too little light?

From what I have read the other thing that seems to impact coral color the most, surprsingly, is dKH. Typically mine is always around 8 (I keep it closer to natural sea water), but I've been considering boosting this up a few points to see if it makes a difference.

Any thoughts on any of this?
 
The corals that you see as having problems, where are they in your tank height wise??

If they are too high up lower them to get less intense light...
 
Two are at the bottom of my tank, one is mid-way up. I just recently moved them around again to see if positioning makes any difference.
 
Well I dont think its not enough lighting so I would not increase your times...Moving them around might work, just kinda trial and error some of them to see if a little more shade works.

Did you recently make any changes to the lights?? bulbs new?
 
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