BEFORE YOU READ THIS, IT IS JUST MY OPINION DUE TO A RESERCH.
Shane, at the begining of the discution you wrote that you have problems
with your corals colors.
I have being doing a serch on that and this is wath I found.
You have 2-175 watts MH and about 200 watts of actinic light, if I don't
have a bad memory you sicht the 10,000 K MH for a 5,500 K. You said that
it was cause you wanted to have a higher PAR and so to increase the color of
your corals.
This is waht I found:
PAR is the photosythesis active radiation (400-700 nanometers), and you
where right the 5,500 have a higher one than the 10,000, but that is not the
entire thing to look for, remember that your corals only use the blue
spectrum of that light and that is the light between 400 and 500 nanometers,
that means that the portion of the PAR between 500 and 700 is not used at
all, so even if you have a higher PAR with the 5,500 you have a lot less of
400-500 nanometer light than with the 10,000. That is why is better to have
a 10,000 than a 5,500.(besides the color)
Now you may be asking why you have better colors now than before, that is
cause you used to have too much blue light in your tank, I don't mean that
it is bud, but as you have a lot of it the zooxanthellae grow in your corals
in great amounts and so the coral turn brownish as the color of the algae.
They were brown but very healtly.
So the solution to the problem that you had was to decrease the amount of
400-500 light. By changing the MH to 5,500 you did it and that is why your
corals have been coloring up, or let say than they have lost some algae and
now you can see the real color of it. The other solution coudl have been to
change your actnic light to 50/50, just to take them out or to use full
spectrum ones.
So you found a soluton to your problem but now I red than you changed the
actinicts to 50/50, so watch out, you may be loosing to much blue lights.
IMHO the ideal solution was to leave the 10,000 and to change the actinics
to 50/50 or full spectrum. In this way you decrease the blue light and at
the same time have a nicer color in your tank.
Any way you dont have to change the MH but just take this info and find your
way.
Hope this helps you all
Walter
PD: if you have caulerpa in your sump, for them is better the 5,500 k cause
they use that spectrum.
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