led vs t5 h.o for soft coral

[DrBlueThumb]

With me I am trying to grow lower light corals such as paly's, aussi/florida rics, shrooms and zoas only. I realized through playing around over the last 12 years that 4 x 24" t5 h.o at 14,000k-20,000k on a 18" deep tank or less gave me best results. I'm going with this on a 35G rectangle aquarium: 2 x attinic plus and 2 x aquablue plus geisemen power chrome.



I am thinking of going led on my 55G, 4 foot rectangle tank. Or should I just stick with what works, and has proven to work? since I am going all soft corals and that leds may be too powerful?

 

the image in my avatar is from my old tank using t5 ho's

[blasterman]

Your question sounds like one of those 'sucker punch' questions we frequently get where the goon squad of T5 lovers is waiting to pounce on any LED -vs- fluorescent tube debate. Also likely why nobody is answering it.

 

I've grown out many, many softie tanks, to the point where I'm giving away purple hornets and gobstoppers because they are growing so fast. Softie growth is virtually almost 100% water conditions. Basically a game of chicken where you run nutrients and mag levels up as as high as they can practically go while keeping pH stable and nuisance algae down.

 

Softies are far less bothered by shadowing caused by collimated light sources (LED), and the versatile color dials on most new LED fixtures allows you dial in some pretty crazy color combinations, and LED fixtures allow you to easily dim them if your softies are getting too much light. If you saw the 450gallon custom tank I saw today in a guy's living room with multiple 2foot table acros growing like weeds and 1foot clams all lit by a hodge podge of generic LED fixtures and AI sols for the past 5 years you woulnd't be asking the question :-) That guy could charge tickets to look at his tank.

[Matteo]

I personally am an LED for the sustainability reasons and power consumption and T5 users I say definitely have great growth and no shadowing but leds definitely give corals a pop and zoas will be just fine. Also like blaster man said I have seen frag tank after frag tank or 400+ builds being lit by Chinese boxes and they're sps pieces are large enough ND obviously doing well.