Lighting

Last year, I posted about the upgrade from single ended metal halides to TwinArc bulbs. I used the same reflectors and ballasts, but could now have 20,000K lighting for a few hours and 10,000K lighting for a few hours, daily. The best of both worlds, right? http://www.reefaddicts.com/entry.php...l-halide-bulbs

10 months later, I knew it was getting close to the time I needed to get new bulbs, and I was really debating what to go with: upgrade to all 400w bulbs ...

This is the first part of the daylight period. I've been running the staggered lighting period for a decade now, and don't see why I'd ever stop. Here's the article I shared a few years ago explaining it in detail: http://www.reefaddicts.com/content.p...d-Lighting-why

Today I installed two new 400w bulbs and one new 400w ballast. One more ballast and bulb will be added tomorrow, and I'll take PAR measurements to know the difference ...

When I built the fishroom back in early 2011, I set up my lightrack to move it out of the way when needed. This isn't often because I use Lumenbright pendants which are way up off the water, but when I need to take them down for cleaning, this is when it's worth the installation back then.

In the picture above, it is pushed all the way back by via rollers riding the track hangers affixed to the ceiling.

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If you are nocturnal like me, you'll grab a flashlight to see what the corals are doing in darkness. I've used a few different flashlights over the years, but by far my favorite is the all blue one that Frag Junky / Orphek released at MACNA last year. It's so incredibly bright blue that corals pop with color.

Left to right: Maglight, Reefs Magazine LED, Red Critter Torch, and Orphek's LED chip.

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At the club meeting last night, I did a presentation on measuring PAR in our reef tanks and why it has value, regardless of the type of lighting choices we employ. I do try to focus on daylight spectrum more than 20,000 Kelvin, because PAR meters are designed to measure sunlight and not the blue spectrum.

Here's the PAR measurement of the frag tank. The light is a Reefkoi Evolution LED fixture that is three years old. The numbers are:
0" - measurement at the surface of the ...