All,
I wanted to throw this new (new to me) thing I am doing on my tank and see
if anyone has any comments. My tank, as some of you may remember, is very
highly lighted. I am running 10.5 watts per gallon. I run 4 - 96 watt VHOs
(2 - 50/50 and 2 actinic) and 2 - 175 watt MH's. With that much light, it is
hard to have success with many corals. Even many of my "light loving" corals
seem not to expand as much as they did in the tanks that I got them from,
and some corals just do not do well.
So, I finally decided to address this situation, and try a little experiment
to see if it made any difference with the color and expansion of my corals.
Is what I did was changed the duration of my lighting so that both of my MHs
are on only for a 4 hour period of time during the day (instead of 8). Here
is how it works.
VHOs click on at 10 am.
The first MH clicks on at 11am.
The second MH clicks on at 2pm.
The first MH clicks off at 6pm.
The second MH clicks of at 9pm.
The VHOs click off at 10pm.
I just started doing this Friday so I dont have any long term results to
report, but I will tell you this. After less than a week, the corals have
really started to open up. All of my acros (except 1 that has been
struggling) really fluff up, my goniopora is much happier, my LPS corals
expand very nicely (well, as good as they can with the amount of current I
have hitting them). The colors on some of my corals have just sort of begun
to change. They are darkening up a bit. By that, I mean the colors of the
corals are becoming darker and more dominant. The purples that used to be a
bit light and washed out are darkening and becoming a nice purple and so on
for the rest of the colors on my corals.
This seems to have made a difference in the positive direction, at least in
the short term. We will see how I feel about it in 3 months. Another bonus
is that there is less of a heat factor on my tank, so my chiller runs less.
It is also kind of cool to have the "sun up sun down" effect on the tank.
Any ways, just thought I would throw that out there. Any thoughts any one???
Shane C.
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