Vega lighting percentages suggestion

topshotta

topshotta

New member
I have a handful of sps frags. Some are growing like weeds but none of them have the color they once did. My water parameters are as follows: 1.025, 0 ammonia and nitrite, nitrate < 5ppm, alk 156ppm, ca around 410-420, phosphate lately runs 0-0.4 (Hanna checker), mg 1300. I typically change about 10% of the water every other week (tropic Marin pro) and my skimmer pulls out a nice amount of skimmate. Tank has been setup since end of may. I currently run my Vegas with a ramp up of 2 hours with sunrise set to 1:45 and sunset at 10:15. Whites are at 40%, red and green at 20% and all blues at 100%. Light is about 10" above the surface. Tank is 60 cube with about 24 gallons in the sump. My refugium has a bunch of ugly algae, mostly brown - cant grow chaeto to save my life. Fuge is illuminated from 10pm to 10am. I run rox carbon in a media reactor changing it out every 2-3 weeks. Is my tank too new to see the color I'm hoping for or perhaps my led settings might be to blame?
 
Remember when interpreting the settings below that the intensity may not match, depending on how many fixtures you have above your tank.

My installation/settings:

24X24" area, approximately 20" deep to the sandbed.

2 Vega fixtures mounted about 15" off of the water surface, side-by-side, about 3" spacing from the edge of one fixture to another.

Settings:

Sunrise: 6:45 a.m., blue/deep blue/royal blue ramp to 65% over 2 hours.
8:00 a.m., white to 53%, red to 60%, green to 60% over 1 hour.

Sunset: 9:00 p.m. - white/red/green to 0% in one hour.
9:00 p.m. - blue/deep blue/royal blue to 0% in 2 hours.

Moon: 3% maximum deep blue (provides zero light at night for 3-4 days on either side of new moon, fairly bright night light 3-4 days around either side of full moon).
 
Which actual SPS? Certain kinds, depending on how deep they were accustomed to being and what light got filtered by the depth of the ocean, might never look as good under the Vega and they can under different types of light. Some can. If they are montis, stylophora, seritiphora and pocilopora, then I would look at tank parameters more since they should look OK under the Vega. If they are true acropora, then they might just be where they are...
 
So perhaps my percentages are on the high side? You are only ramping the blues up to 65% whereas mine are at 100%. My tank is 24x24x24 and lights are about 10" above water level.
 
The blues are not the problem. For some SPS that cannot handle the garbage spectrum, the whites are the issue - a 4:1 white ratio of blue:white or about 20% intensity on most fixtures is more than enough for the coral. This thread is long, but good in parts (other parts really stink). It outlines why most LED are not really good for SPS and other corals, but can be OK if done differently. The R&D guys from a few of the sponsors are really good in this IMO.
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2315500
 
Thanks for the link - I browsed through it. So you are suggesting no more than 20% on whites? Blues will be okay at 100%? What about the Red and Greens?
 
Don't think that you cannot nuke your corals with the blue spectrum - you definitely can. In fact, there's a heck of a lot greater chance of doing that with the blues in the Vega fixture than with your whites, reds or greens. The reason for this is that there are many more blue LEDs in a Vega fixture than the whites, reds, and greens, LEDs are more efficient at producing light from a given current in the blue spectrum, and blue light is far more intrinsically energetic than light in the longer wavelengths.

If you are running two of these fixtures over a 24X24" area, and you've got you're blues cranked to 100%, I'm really, really surprised you haven't bleached the heck out of any coral that is within 6-8" of the water surface.
 
This is not a quantity thing, rather a quality. The white LEDs, even in small number are capable of damaging SPS with excess/harmful spectrum that the white diodes put out. The blue LEDs are more appropriate and I doubt that you can have too many in a typical fixture unless you use some really focused lenses or something. The SPS that are needing the blue can handle the intensity. You might have to build your way up to full output - I don't know about that. However, since spectrum shifts under less-than-full power, you might be better off running less blues at 100% than more blues at 60%. Check out that thread - it is very good and can answer a lot of questions.
 
My Vegas are 5 inches off the water surface and have a ramp up of four hours to 100%. They stay 100% for 4.5 hours then a 4 hour ramp down for a 12.5 hour day. There are numerous sps colonies that have grown near to the water surface and are just 5 inches away from the LEDs. None have ever bleached and the color is great. You have not stated exactly what corals you have but if it was my tank I would very slowly start increasing the intensities and adjust the timing. I would want all the LEDs (yes the red and green too) to ramp up to 100% for about 4 hours a day to simulate the suns max during the hours of 10AM to 2PM. The ramp up and down should not give a day length greater than about 12 hours. The goal is to copy as best you can what happens in the wild.
 
reefkeeper2 said:
My Vegas are 5 inches off the water surface and have a ramp up of four hours to 100%. They stay 100% for 4.5 hours then a 4 hour ramp down for a 12.5 hour day. There are numerous sps colonies that have grown near to the water surface and are just 5 inches away from the LEDs. None have ever bleached and the color is great. You have not stated exactly what corals you have but if it was my tank I would very slowly start increasing the intensities and adjust the timing. I would want all the LEDs (yes the red and green too) to ramp up to 100% for about 4 hours a day to simulate the suns max during the hours of 10AM to 2PM. The ramp up and down should not give a day length greater than about 12 hours. The goal is to copy as best you can what happens in the wild.
Click to expand...

I'd love for you to share your actual timer program for your Vegas. I'm using the easy timer setting currently. I have about 15 sps, a couple monti and milli and a handful of acros. Just got 8 more frags from Jason Fox today which are stunning. I must reiterate that I'm getting plenty of growth currently and polyps are really extended.
 
Like you I'm using the easy timer. I like the blue version. Four hour ramp up, four and a half hours at 100%, then four hours ramp down. Easy.
 
I have been tweaking my Vegas lately trying to find the sweet spot for my sps. Right now I am running 10% red and green, 35% white and blues at 55%. My lights are mounted 9.5" above water and are setup long ways across a 48" wide 90 gallon tank. Right now most of my sps is doing well I have one that has faded color but not bleached. I just started dosing amino acids and already seeing great improvement in color and PE.
 
jda said:
This is not a quantity thing, rather a quality. The white LEDs, even in small number are capable of damaging SPS with excess/harmful spectrum that the white diodes put out.
Click to expand...

This conclusion, by the way, isn't correct (I'm not assigning the conclusion to you, btw, I've seen such speculation in other threads). The idea that a white LED can somehow damage SPS is disallowed by both physics and biology. One reason such a conclusion should get a "bull hockey" response from the hobby is that before about year 2000, most metal halides were quite yellow. And except for the UV and infrared components, they were quite similar to the spectrum put out by white LEDs.

Sorry folks, but this idea just doesn't pass the (science) sniff test.
 
dkeller_nc said:
This conclusion, by the way, isn't correct (I'm not assigning the conclusion to you, btw, I've seen such speculation in other threads). The idea that a white LED can somehow damage SPS is disallowed by both physics and biology. One reason such a conclusion should get a "bull hockey" response from the hobby is that before about year 2000, most metal halides were quite yellow. And except for the UV and infrared components, they were quite similar to the spectrum put out by white LEDs.

Sorry folks, but this idea just doesn't pass the (science) sniff test.
Click to expand...

Read through that thread linked in post 6. See if the science and research posted by Reef Breeders and Pacific Sun seem like more than a sniff test. They have charts of both MH bulbs and LED and they are quite different. BTW - nobody that I know is using pre-2000 MH bulbs anymore either.
 
I spent more time on that thread last night. It's too much science for me - lol. I just want to know what settings people have been successful with and go from there.
 
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