LED's with a whiter/brighter look?

S

sharko88

Are there any LED units out there that give the look of a 12K Metal Halide bulb but doesn't fry corals? Even though I have a 31 inch deep tank and my radion gen 2's 14 inches above the water line, I still have to set the light's cool white channel down to 30% or lower (and with 50% overall intensity that means net 15%). This makes the tank too dim and too blue for my taste and my corals still are not doing well (water parameters have been perfect all year). Again, looking for an LED unit that has an output similar in brightness and color to a 12K Metal Halide bulb and won't kill coral?
 
Have you done a PAR measurement?  If you have elevated PAR I can see frying things.  If not there might be some other root cause.  I know you're saying the parameters are perfect (please do list them), but if they were, things would be doing better.  May be something not being measured.
 
Alk 10  Calc 420 PH 8.3 Salinity 1.025 Phosphates 0.00 Nitrates 0 Temp 80.3 Magnesium 1290I have been battling these lights for 3 years now and made sure to make changes during that time to automate things to keep parameters more steady like add an auto top off and a doser.  Thevissue is not with the water chemistry as I have ruled that out with constant levels for at least six months (and they were not bouncing much before I installed the doser but wanted to automate more).
 
Put in a 1/2 tsp of potassium nitrate, or try to up your feeding by at least 50% for a couple weeks.  No nitrates, no phosphates, and a bunch of light is a great formula to starve even SPS.  (I've spent months of not years chasing this very issue in my own tanks).Light drives the need for nutrients, so it isn't a surprise that lowering the lights helps in this case.The ULNS tanks I've seen aren't really low nutrient.  They often get away with high export by also having high additions so that there is always an availability of food even if it isn't resulting in high nitrate/phosphate readings.
 
I will try that out.  I had read some forums where people talked about too clean of a tank causing issues.  I only have one clown fish and some snails and hermits in there right now so bioload from fish and such is very tiny.I picked up a sample of Reef Roids and Coralific Delite to do some target feeding of the LPS so hopefully that also helps them so I can hopefully go to a little whiter spectrum.  I found my old Par readings I did about 2 years ago so I can start to hopefully creep up the lights little by little after 1 or 2 months of doing target feedings 3 times a week.
 
Assuming the water stays clean you can get away with broadcast feeding a single clown a cube of mysis every day or two.  I was feeding the pair of clowns in my biocube a cube of PE mysis every day for a while, and the tank did great.  I only cut back because I got tired of buying that much mysis for two fish.IMO getting nutrients flowing into the system (without fouling water of course) is 90% of the battle.  The last 10% is the right mix, but most people are happy with what the first 90% does.  I'm a fan of macro algae in a fuge (or really wherever, I flooded the back of my biocube as a chaeto fuge), so I advise some of that if you don't have any currently.
 
I had some caulerpa going in my fuge up until about 3 months ago.  I have had some fuzzy red algae (not cyno but not sure exactly what kind it is, looks like a red hair algae) growing in there pretty bad so I did pull all of the calulerpa out when I was pulling out some of the red fuzzy algae.  Thinking about putting some cheato back in there after a good scrubbing of the fuge chamber.
 
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