XR30W Pro thoughts when getting started

[doctorwhoreefer]

Greetings! Posted this in another thread, I guess I should have posted it here to hear straight from the horses mouth as it were!

Just got them hooked up the other day, coming from a diy cree fixture that was lower light.

I've got soft/lps/sps, right now at about 15%, it may be a bit dimmer than the last fixture right now, but I would like to give a bit extra acclimation since the spectrum has probably changed a bit too.

Any hindsight thoughts on these fixtures? I've seen a lot of posts warn of turning them too high so far.

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Is there any warnings Ecotech has for getting a tank adjusted to these lights? I've seen a bit of good response from the corals in the last couple days they've been on, but I think I might have to adjust rock as my mummy eye chalice isn't as shaded as it used to be. The RMS mount is great I had some concerns on how tight to tighten the rms mount rim holder especially, but it's a decent setup overall.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Loving the lights setup with my Apex, for sure!! (really wish the acclimation system and sunrise/sunset would hurry up and get released for the apex hehe)

 

[doctorwhoreefer]

bump

 

[aleithol]

There are lots of opinions and lots of tinkering you can do. IMHO, you need to adapt everything you read and hear to what works for you. I avoid most absolute statements, as how your specific tank is going to react is going to depend on the number of Radions, their lenses, their placement, your spectrums, their duration, and what and where you have inhabitants placed in your aquascape ...but of course your flow and water chemistry is going to add in to that equation, so if you're changing multiple things at the same time, its going to be hard to say what was really the cause and effect.

Since you asked for opinions and advice, here's some of mine off the top of my head. As they say, your mileage may vary. ;-)

Personal Opinion ON:

• Right, start slow and ramp up slow -- not in days, but across weeks. You need to understand and use acclimation mode, or create one of your own.
• If I was coming from old lights to the Radion on an existing tank, I'd try to simulate spectrum and intensity of my old lights across to my Radions as a starting point, then modify from there. Doing the research as to what sort of light your tank was receiving (do you have access to a PAR meter?) and using that as a starting point may be best for your inhabitants, than just taking a swag at what to set a new light. At least try to do it based on mfgr specs, and realize that as LED fixtures age, what they are producing begins to vary from when they were brand new.
• I personally believe too much UV can be a problem for some corals, even if people like the visual appeal. Not all lights have a specific UV channel, so this could be new to your inhabitants. Defaulting to 100% as many profiles do in most of their spectrum settings, I'm convinced was a problem for me -- others may disagree. I suggest now to always ramp UV up even slower than what you do with overall intensity of any spectrum.
• Consider that PAR will drop off as you go deeper in your tank. That may require movement of some corals to keep others doing their best once you've dialed-in overall spectrum and intensity.
• Similarly, if you are using wide-angle TIR lenses, intensity is a lot lower than standard lenses to begin with and drops off not only on depth, but how far out you go away from the center of each LED cluster.
• You're going to need to play with which spectrums you use. There are more opinions than people reading this forum in that regard. Some people keep it the same most of the day, others vary it considerably. Lower spectrums will appear more yellow to the eye (and therefore not as visually appealing to many people), but for some corals may provide faster growth -- higher spectrums (e.g. 18K-20K) will give a more blue appearance, and for me, 20K at lower intensity is just too-blue visually to look at for any length of time. Some corals (and even fish) may react differently to different spectrums and their intensity in terms of how they do or don't open up, and in the case of fish, when some may head off to bed earlier than the rest keeping intensity the same, but tweaking the spectrum. Some people put the "ugly" lower spectrums on earlier in their photoperiod and adjust to the more visually appealing higher spectrums later in the day when you may be viewing your tank more. The combinations from people are all over the map.
• Once you think you've got spectrums figured out, or at least a consistent starting point, you can then play with and perhaps tweak color channels, e.g. there is discussion in other RC subforums and sites if too much red contributes more to nuisance algae or not. Of course, in general, too much of any light may cause nuisance algae if the conditions otherwise exist for it to take hold.

Personal Opinion OFF:

My suggestion is take in people's input, but do a few more searches and look both in this subform just a little further down for some threads discussing PAR of standard and wide-angle TIR lenses that include photos and placement which may be of help, then do some broader searches on other topics like effects of lighting on algae, corals, and such -- and develop your own approach while coming to your own conclusions what works best for your situation.

Good luck and enjoy that new Radion.

 

[doctorwhoreefer]

Excellent!

Thanks very much for the response, sounds like I have indeed found a decent grasp on things, I don't believe I got lost in that.

I have indeed looked into the red associations for algae, they definitely exist (check out the Hog ATS etc revisions) but I've also found this over time (wwwadvancedaquaristcom/blog/red-light-negatively-affects-health-of-stony-coral) so I personally think a bit of red isn't bad, but these aren't freshwater tanks here!

May I ask what your personal acclimation %'s were? (I chose Apex over Ecosmartlive; kinda sucks there's no acclimation or sunrise/sunset but I decided integration with the apex was more important than fragmenting my system.. ba-dun-ching)

I do have a seneye par meter as well, been approaching/matching the par value from the old setup. A bit nervous with the spectrum change, but I would think they would have a bigger issue with intensity changes from led to led. (it is the pro, so TIR lense included iirc)

Thanks again for the input, much appreciated!

 

[aleithol]

I too control my Radions via Apex, but other than not having a basic automated acclimation mode, also find complete integration with the rest of my setup is a far better solution, e.g. I have somewhat random storms occur that change flow with lighting -- some days of the week with lightning, others without, and the lighting effects only happen during prime time while storms may also happen in the earlier hours of the morning before my real photoperiod begins. Of course, all my pumps, heaters, etc are programmed together, so e.g. if I need to remove my hood to do tank maint, I flip one outlet on my Apex, my Radions go out as do associated pumps and such. Flip it back on, everything comes up in proper sequence and timing without a hitch or ever forgetting something I otherwise would.

I also have no problems with sunrise/sunset and utilize the Apex season table to automatically adjust the times my early morning lighting comes on as well as handling my moonlights to match the physical moon outside my home at this lat/longitude. (I use an LSM with 3 simple LEDs that are more than sufficient for my needs, allowing my Apex to physically turn my Radions off for 9+ hours a day when I don't need their fans to run when the lights are off -- my Apex will turn my larger cabinet fans on if temps or humidity gets unusually high in my cabinet even when the Radions are off).

Difficult to compare acclimation percentages, as I have wide-angle TIR lenses on my tank -- you may not. They were a pay-for option when I purchased my Radion Pro 3Gs earlier this year and required my manually swapping them out on the fixtures. Anyway, I played with spectrum changes and duration at about the same time as "acclimation", so it's hard to give a single consistent number I used -- I'd say though I bumped up intensity about 5% every week or no more than about 10% every 2-3 weeks. FWIW, my QT lighting has blue and whites only, and even at max intensity provides less than half the PAR of what my Radions with Wide-angle lenses can produce with far wider and broader spectrums. As I was adding corals from QT to my (now 7-month old) DT on a monthly basis after it cycled, I'd drop overall intensity back down in the DT to the 50% range and start it up again -- that varied based on what I was adding and where in the aquascape. Have stopped new introductions for a while, so I got my 2 Radions up to 100% (over a 54"Lx24"D tank, with those wide-angle lenses), but am now fairly convinced it's too much for some corals, so just a few days ago backed it off to 85% and within only 2-3 days one of the corals started to color-up again... hence, I'm still adjusting... Next on my "try it" list is to move a fungi and tracy on my sand bed closer towards shadows to see if less intensity helps them, then I can bump overall intensity back up. Seems like there is always something to tinker with.

Since you're an Apex+Radion guy like I am, I suggest you keep in touch with this subforum on Radion/EcoTech-specific subjects, but also head over to Neptune Systems Community forums -- especially the Lighting subforum. You'll find a lot of useful info there on integration and control -- not as much on Radion-specific or lighting philosphy-sorta things. A couple of threads that may be helpful:

• Several stickies at the beginning of that forum of interest perhaps using the season table, programming "random" weather effects, etc
• Discussion and a few examples of controlling Radions in Fusion, along with the graphs
• THIS THREAD contains some very long write-ups I fairly recently did to help a guy in London, where I showed and tried to explain spectrums, what my lighting schedule and spectrums were (at least as of mid-October -- I'm always tweaking) and a bunch of other stuff you may find interesting. I'm "BertL" over on those forums if you look in that thread for my posts...

Good luck.