LED Issues, Need some advice! (Warning: Long!)

[werkkrew]

Before I sell my current fixture and go buy an ATI 8-bulb T5 fixture I am hoping some of you guys can help me.

 

My current build is a 70g custom 36"(L) x 20"(D) x 24"(H) aquarium with a Nanobox Hybrid above it. I have no experience with LED fixtures other than this one. My previous builds were always 100% T5.

 

The Nanobox Hybrid is a 24" LED+T5 fixture with:

• 4x 24w T5s - My bulbs are 2x ATI Coral+, 2x ATI Blue+
• 4x "Nanobox v3" LED Arrays @ 700mA in a default 2-channel configuration

 

In this configuration I believe the white/lime/violet LEDs are on the "white" channel together and the blue/royal blue/cyan are on the "blue" channel together.

 

First, lets assume my water quality is perfect. I know that is a wild assumption but I want to focus on the lighting here as the potential issue. While I am very open to water quality related suggestions I want toi try to focus on just the lighting aspect of my system here.

 

Just to get it out of the way though, here are my parameters as of yesterday:

• Temp: 78, stable within 0.5 degrees
• Ph: 8.1-8.3
• SG: 1.026
• Alk: ~9dKh
• Cal: 450ppm
• Mg: 1400ppm
• Phosphate: 0.02 - 0.04
• Nitrate: 0-3ppm

My tank is about 6 months old at this point and I am really struggling to find the sweet spot with this light. When I first got the light I ran it with about 50/50 on the LED and the T5's on for about 4 hours. I have had a lot of coloration issues in my SPS. I have been experimenting for months and ripping my hair out about it. After talking to some local people and doing an insane amount of reading I started to draw the conclusion that I was in a situation where I was providing too much light. The main reason for this was that my SPS were not coloring up right. Well known acro frags just looking drab in my system. Most of the time it was trending toward the brown end of things, but my stylos were getting bleached tips. A frag that was grown under Radion's with amazing color and polyp extension would look sort of crappy within a few weeks in my tank. Growing, encrusting, but just not peak health.

 

So I started to gradually make changes to the lighting. First I raised the fixture from about 4" off the water to about 6" off the water and decreased the amount of time I was doing T5 from about 5 hours to about 3 hours daily. Then I started to increase the blue channel and decrease the white channel to maintain an overall 50% output on a bell curve. This didn't really help anything but it didn't make things worse either.

 

At this point it seems like I had to be providing enough light, so refusing to believe it was a lighting issue I worked on making sure my parameters are perfectly ideal and stable. I have an Apex and I perform weekly 10% water changes. I took any non-encrusted frags and gave them another dip. All corals and fish in my tank followed a pretty strict quarantine process so I am very confident I do not have any pests in my system. I have tested and re-tested my params and I cannot narrow down an issue with my water so I turned my focus back to the light.

 

I went so far as to borrow the Apex PAR meter and do an analysis of my system:

 

http://werkkrew.com/2015/09/09/nano-box-hybrid-review-and-par-analysis/

 

I talked to Dave and he suggested running the blue channel at 100% almost all day and use the white channel and T5's to simulate the sun. As such I had my blues ramp to 100% fairly quickly and my whites peak at only 30%. In this configuration over the past few weeks my SPS has faded even more and now my Zoas are "reaching" for light, it appears. A number of my zoas are also really fading in color. I hesitate to say they are bleaching, they just aren't nearly as vibrant as they were before.

 

So thinking that running the blues at 100% might have been too much still, I began to reduce it. Gradually over the past couple of weeks I have gotten to this point:

• 6 hours T-5
• 12 hour curve of LED peaking for 3 hours with 60% blue channel and 20% white channel

 

Things keep looking worse, so the obvious thing to do is to go in the other direction...

 

At this point I am going to switch back to my 100 blue/30 white peak setup and slowly increase the whites by about 1-2% per day until I see some sort of result for better or worse.

 

My fear is that in order for my tank to be happy light wise, I might be at a point where I am almost at 100% output which is bad for two reasons...one the way it looks visually to me is not desirable in this setup and two, I would have no more headroom to grow.

 

Do you guys think I might not have enough light for my tank in a primarily SPS configuration? When I bought the light I was under the impression this thing would be more light than I could ever need over a tank my size and given the price of it, I certainly hope that is true.

 

I have noticed that most of the response from the corals has been as a result of altering my white channel. I think this might be mostly due to the violet LED's being on this channel but I am not sure if the white/lime/violet channel contains any "essential" aspects of the spectrum. If I re-wire this thing to separate out the Violets from the White/Lime I could confirm this suspicion.

 

Right now I am considering the following options:

• Calm down and just gradually increase my white channel until the corals look happy again. My only concern here is that I wind up with an undesirable visual look.
• Upgrade / Change my Nanobox light to use 1A drivers and split it out beyond 2-channels to 4-channels to get more output headroom and more spectrum control.
• Get some sort of reflector material for the T5s
• Sell this fixture, buy an 8-bulb 36" T5 fixture and use the leftover cash for more corals...

I love this light, and Dave has been amazing to work with but if I don't get this issue sorted out sooner than later I am going to be losing a lot of corals.

 

[markalot]

Dose nitrate or otherwise get it up to 10, be amazed. LED is difficult but can produce amazing results when dialed in. Keep PAR around 300 max and don't do more than 6 hours of full intensity. Feed HEAVILY, export frantically.

 

In my 29 (now 40) with all LED the only thing that saved it was dosing nitrates since my nitrates were always almost undetectable. Use the Saliftert nitrate kit or better if not using it already.

 

Only other thing I can think of is stability. KH of 9 looks fine, I prefer 8, but for SPS it must be stable, no swings of more than .5 in any 24 hour period. If you glance at my 40 gallon thread and scroll back you'll see all my issues with SPS until I added a little CaNO3 and withing a week my slimer was greener than in my big tank. I was gob smacked. Could be the tank, could be LED's, could be dumb luck, but worth a try.

 

To continue my experiment I've moved most of my favorite acros to my 40 and will see if I can maintain or get better color than under T5's. You have a hybrid so it should be easier.

[soeminpaing]

Did you properly light acclimate the sps? In my experience changing light setttings often is much more problemetic. I usually start out low and slowly increase intensity over months. If you often change the settings it might be the culprit.

[werkkrew]

Dose nitrate or otherwise get it up to 10, be amazed. LED is difficult but can produce amazing results when dialed in. Keep PAR around 300 max and don't do more than 6 hours of full intensity. Feed HEAVILY, export frantically.

 

In my 29 (now 40) with all LED the only thing that saved it was dosing nitrates since my nitrates were always almost undetectable. Use the Saliftert nitrate kit or better if not using it already.

 

Only other thing I can think of is stability. KH of 9 looks fine, I prefer 8, but for SPS it must be stable, no swings of more than .5 in any 24 hour period. If you glance at my 40 gallon thread and scroll back you'll see all my issues with SPS until I added a little CaNO3 and withing a week my slimer was greener than in my big tank. I was gob smacked. Could be the tank, could be LED's, could be dumb luck, but worth a try.

 

To continue my experiment I've moved most of my favorite acros to my 40 and will see if I can maintain or get better color than under T5's. You have a hybrid so it should be easier.

 

I actually did start dosing nitrate for a few days via KNO3. My nitrates were 0 for a while and after a week of dosing they got up to about 7 and started to see signs of some nuisance algae so I stopped.

 

As for feeding heavily and exporting heavily I am doing that. In terms of export I am carbon dosing VSV, I have a 10g refugium with macro and I run GFO. My skimmer is also rated for a tank about 3x the size and is a recirc. In terms of feeding I have been very liberal with LRS reef frenze, coral frenzy, oyster feast, phyto feast, red sea reef energy a+b, etc.

[markalot]

 

I actually did start dosing nitrate for a few days via KNO3. My nitrates were 0 for a while and after a week of dosing they got up to about 7 and started to see signs of some nuisance algae so I stopped.

 

As for feeding heavily and exporting heavily I am doing that. In terms of export I am carbon dosing VSV, I have a 10g refugium with macro and I run GFO. My skimmer is also rated for a tank about 3x the size and is a recirc. In terms of feeding I have been very liberal with LRS reef frenze, coral frenzy, oyster feast, phyto feast, red sea reef energy a+b, etc.

 

GFO will harm corals, PO4 will harm colors and cause algae. I can't do nanos well due to my non tolerance of algae, they take a lot of work, but put up with some algae and see if you can get the colors. I've killed a lot of acros with GFO so I'm very hesitant to use all but the tiniest amout to tweak colors if needed.

 

You don't have an LED problem IMO, you have plenty of T5 light to compensate for any shadowing issues. I'm still at a loss to explain how my smaller tanks can somehow eat nitrate while my larger one has nitrate issues without bio-pellets and heavy skimming. I am convinced reasonably low PO4 and measurable nitrates are key, but I haven't solved the algae issue. My 2 tangs and foxface can barely keep up with the algae in my 150.

[werkkrew]

Did you properly light acclimate the sps? In my experience changing light setttings often is much more problemetic. I usually start out low and slowly increase intensity over months. If you often change the settings it might be the culprit.

 

I did not, reason being that the tank all of my SPS came from has an insane amount of light over it. Probably a bad idea but in any case they have been in my tank for months now. I agree that often changing the settings might be the culprit, that's why I'm trying to find out a sane set of settings that I can be confident is not too much or too little light.

[evilc66]

Couple of comments from me:

• I'm pretty sure you did no compensation for PAR readings from the LEDs. The Apogee quantum sensor is known to read low in the blue/violet range of the spectrum. With the different LED color ganged together it does make it hard to apply somewhat accurate compensations, but for what you have, I'd add 10% to the white channel and 15% to the blue channel. Those numbers are conservative, but should get you in the ballpark.
• Spectrally, light is light, no matter what the source. There is nothing wrong there, and you can play with the balance between white and blue all day.
• Intensity wise, you have more than enough power available to you for virtually any coral anywhere in the tank.
• There is far less risk starting with lower than necessary output over higher than necessary output. It takes far less time to recover from browning than bleaching, so starting at a lower setting (I'd go with around 50%, but adjusted based on your prefered color temperature) never hurts. From that point you can slowly work your way up to intensity levels that are more appropriate. And by slow, I mean 5% every week or two. Slow and steady...
• You make the assumption at the beginning of this thread that your water quality is perfect. I'm going to say it's not. Lights, especially LEDs seem to be the whipping post for a multitude of tank problems, but in all honesty, they are the least likely to be causing a problem with the exception of too much/too little intensity. Like I said earlier, light is light, no matter what the source. There are many of us here that are using Dave's arrays with sps without any issues, so it's not a spectral problem.

[knd107]

Hey, I'm in Philly too; well work in Philly and live in SJ.

 

I agree with Evil. I thought your LED would be no more than 50% since you can't control the T5s.

 

If I would you, I would set my LEDs @ 55% Blue, 45% White then increase from there as needed.

[mpc]

I would say - you need to do a thinking.

 

I know a rule of thumb for T5 is - 1W per 1 Liter of water (starting point actually). 70 gallons roughly translates to 300 Liters.

Now...what do you have... 156 electric LED wats (theoretical maximum) + 4x24=96W T5... Now... Let us be very generous and say - you would max out your LEDs...and that they provide 200W in T5 terms. So you have these rougly 300W of power. The only problem is - how you distribute them - and with LEDs it is rather tricky because of high intenisty areas and not-enough intensity areas.

 

I would suggest to

1) Switch one white bulb to GIESEMANN Super-Actinic for example or something simmilar (make combo Actinic+blue and blue+white or maybe actinic+white)

2) IF you make a 10hour day cycle - utilize the actinic bulb the most....for whole 10 hours

3) actinic+blue on, after 2 hours switch on the blue channel of LEDs, after another hour switch also white LED channel, then after another 0.5 hours switch the remaining T5s on...and then in reverse fade them out (thus MAX light would be on for 3 hours).

4) Blue channel of LEDs on max (BUT you have to acclimate your tank to these changes first).

5) You might want to experiment with the placement of your corals.

 

Zoas with long stalks means that they need more light.

 

So with such approach you could start to experiment with durations of each light to better match the needs of your corals.

At least that would be what I would try. At least one true actinic bulb is a must (imho).

[jedimasterben]

Watts per gallon/liter literally means nothing. That's like measuring our tank volumes in an arbitrary measurement, like bowls or buckets. It tells you nothing of the actual volume.

 

Every light has a different intensity due to different phosphors that affect spectrum and efficiency. If you took two generic Chinese T5 lamps in a shitty fixture and pit them against quality German lamps in a quality fixture with good reflectors, wattage will not change, but output can nearly double.

[mpc]

W/liter means something. It is a rule of thumb - something to hold on to when you have NO CLUE at ALL!

If you want to solve a problem you need some input data...and when you have NONE you can turn to this old forgotten rule to start guestimating.

[jedimasterben]

W/liter means something. It is a rule of thumb - something to hold on to when you have NO CLUE at ALL!

If you want to solve a problem you need some input data...and when you have NONE you can turn to this old forgotten rule to start guestimating.

No, it still literally means nothing. It isn't a rule of thumb if it doesn't make any sense. It is not useful in the least.

[mpc]

Just because you say it doesn't make any sense - doesn't mean it doesn't make any sense...

Cheerz mate!

[Horerczy]

It's a useless measurement. Better quality lamps and fixtures will use less power and make more light.

 

It also doesn't take into account what is being kept like the low light softies or the highlight demanding clams.

 

Or how deep the tank is as light exponentially decreases in brightness with distance.

 

I could go on but I think my point is clear.