140 Gallon Starphire Build

Well I decided to change from AI Sol Blues back to metal halides. I need to go with something proven.

I found some sfiligoi fixtures with acls dimmable ballasts. I chose acls ballasts as they dim from 0 to 100 like LEDs so I still get sunrise and sunset. I am either gonna go with 14k Phoenix or 20k radiums. Plus these fixtures have 4 T5's built in so prob go 2 ati true actinic, ati blue plus and a KZ Fiji purple.

I will probably and add couple reef brite or ponorama blue leds


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Growth on my acros was good just coloring I was not happy with on red and orange acros. Plus my acans and certain lps have turned orange.

My Cali tort has turned all blue while before it was green with blue stalks. My red planet was green with pink tips.

Maybe I will go back when the LEDs cover more of the spectrum. In my opinion LEDs do not cover the whole spectrum like mh or t5


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What really changed my mind is I bought some acro colonies at f2m anniversary sale one was orange with pink tips. Another was blue with pink tips these were all under mh after couple months under my LEDs the have lost their coloring.


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@kuyatwo wrote:
Growth on my acros was good just coloring I was not happy with on red and orange acros. Plus my acans and certain lps have turned orange. My Cali tort has turned all blue while before it was green with blue stalks. My red planet was green with pink tips. Maybe I will go back when the LEDs cover more of the spectrum. In my opinion LEDs do not cover the whole spectrum like mh or t5 Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk said:
agreed and it's why I think I'll stick with a combo of T5's and LED's for now
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Plus since my tank is 48 L x 30 wide I really prob need couple more ai fixtures to get full coverage. With 6 AI sol blues is 4 amp. With 2 x 250 and the t5's in the Sfiligoi fixture it is 6 amps so in my opinion not really saving that much money on electricity.


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Quick update

I sold the Aqua Illumination Leds and switched to a sfiligoi xr6 fixture with dimmable acls ballast. The main reason was the coloring of the corals were not to my liking. I bought two fixtures but I am getting great coverage with one. Each fixture hold a 400 watt bulbs and 4 t5's so I went with Radium 20k and 2 x ati blue plus and 2 x ati true actininc from sos lighting located locally in dallas. I can tell you the coloring is starting to come back the acans i had that turned orange are now coloring back up to original rainbow colors and my chalices are popping in color.
 
@cabi wrote:
So you are just using one fixture (23.5 long) on your tank? That's great coverage!! said:
Yeah one fixture it covers the whole tank with great par I still get around 150 par at each end of the tank with 225 - 250 in the middle of the tank. I do have another xr6 fixture in case I need a more even par across the whole tank but I am redoing my aquascaping to have sps closer to the middle and my lps and chalice near the ends


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That's cool.. I'm settting up a new tank(36x30wx20h) and I was wondering about that fixture coverage. But still don't know what route to take after reading about the color of your corals with the led! I was thinking 2 radions or 1 rx6! What you think?
 
if corals do well I prob gonna be selling the second sifilogoi fixture.

Personally I would only go back to LEDs with a combo of t5's. My experience is LEDs colored up only certain corals and corals colored red orange or yellow turned orange. This is a common problem with LEDs


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This is the reason I was skeptical and stuck with my MH/t5/led combo the best of all worlds so why change..lol. I'm sure things will turn around for you now.
 
@chrisrush wrote:
Ever thought of adding any red or green LEDs to the ai? said:
no if anything I was gonna to add a couple t5's but never did. I just feel that LEDs are not hitting a certain spectrum for corals that is why you need t5's to cover that wide band. LEDs just hit a specific spectrum not ramp up to it like t5's or mh

My tank being 30" front to back. I really wasn't getting good coverage. I prob needed to add 2 more and change to different lenses.


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Hey Pampee,

I want a couple of sps frag's from you that did not color up so I can test out the diy led unit that I'm building. lmk

Cheers,
 
@Nizz wrote:
Radion LED would give you that full color spectrum. But the price gets me right now. said:
not necessarily

Once rc comes back up from their backups read this good thread. Here is post from that thread. It is a quote from someone who say Anthony calfo speak.

" Interesting. I was in Lake Mary this past weekend at the SRC bi-annual conference and one of the speakers (Anthony Calfo) touched on this exact topic with LED's. He mentioned that one of the issues with LED's is that the wave spectrum peaks are extremely 'spiked' at its particular Kelvin temp instead of a nice 'blunt' curved peak you get with a MH/T5 bulb. He said the range of Nm are very very small and specific with LED's.
His analogy was the LED's peak wave length is like a laser beam trying to hit its target (the zooanthella sp?) and if that 'beam' is not the exact color/temp needed for photosythesis of that particular cluster of zooanthella, then they are screwed. Most corals have several kinds of zooanthella in their skin and require different spectrum for photosythesis... i.e. 420-480. A blue LED may be more like 430-435 (example only)...causing the 'color shift' in your corals or even zooanthella die off (lightening). "

Once rc is backup great thread on corals turning orange under LEDs

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2032737


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@bimmerzs wrote:
Hey Pampee said:
These are the sps corals i lost coloring in ora cali tort, Jason Fox Paris Hilton, Purple Monster, tyree ultimate stag and Red planet, 500k efflo, f2m efflo they all lost their two tone coloring. ie f2m efflo is purple and brown when i had leds it became all brown, red plane and cali tort had green base under leds it was all blue or all red
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