Blue and White light balance

BillyD

New Member
Messages
3
Reaction score
1
Location
duluth, ga
Good morning !
General question lighting preference. I’ve read all over the net and very mixed opinions, so I figured I would ask locally.

On a 100% light intensity would a tank with corals and fish be good with 80% blues/violet and 20% white ?
or more of a 50/50?
I also have red and green I can throw in but have read there’s really no data yet.
 
I don’t run a white channel on my setup. I turned it off on my Radion and my Orphek bars are blue sky and blue plus.
 
I would much rather run all blues but have been running 50/50 whites and blues and wasn’t sure if I needed to do that.
 
For me there are two considerations here 1) I want the coral to get the spectrum they want and 2) I want them to look good to me. I certainly believe the "blues" are essential for growth but I can't handle that look all the time.

For me I have a 12 hour light schedule that starts with Blue and Violet at 100% and white at zero.

I this slowly ramp up in intensity to a high intensity point for 4 hours from 1:00 - 5:00. At that point my spectrum is as below:
1634784867446.png

Kessil has a separate configuration for intensity so you will have to figure out how this works for your needs/equipment. My intensity settings are as below.

1634784982634.png


The two hours before and after the high light period of my day the white is at 40%

1634785030620.png

Good luck with yours.
 
Good morning !
General question lighting preference. I’ve read all over the net and very mixed opinions, so I figured I would ask locally.

On a 100% light intensity would a tank with corals and fish be good with 80% blues/violet and 20% white ?
or more of a 50/50?
I also have red and green I can throw in but have read there’s really no data yet.

I think it depends a lot on which lights you are using.

I run the Noopsyche pro 2's and I think the max my whites get up to is 4%. Some lights have much less LEDs on the white channel so you need to run the percentages higher to get the same affect.

Remember for most lights 50% blues and 50% whites means just running both individual channels at 50% of the intensity.
For mine I have a ramp up to 90% on the blue spectrum and 4 % on the white spectrum.
 
First let me start off by saying there's a lot more than light intensity to tuning the fixtures. Low nutrient systems need less light, this is where you'll see burnt tips on SPS if the lights are turned up too high. Think 0.01-0.03 PO4 and 0.1-1.0 NO3. Then there's the type of tank you plan to run. Softy/LPS, SPS or mixed reef.

Nutrients aside. If all you're doing is growing coral and don't care what the fish or other non-florescent things look like in your tank, then just run the UV and blue. But tune them so you don't over power the tank. Those wavelengths are very hard for our eyes to distinguish intensity. 80-100% may be way too strong and will also add wear to the diodes. For Softy/LPS and mixed reef 80-120 par at the sand bed should be more than enough and I wouldn't push it past 150-180 down there. If you go that high or higher I would highly recommend figuring out what settings get you back down around 100 par so you know were to drop the intensity to for acclimation of new corals and slowly ramp them up. For SPS only 180-250 par at the sand bed. If you're seeing burnt tips lower the intensity.

Now if you want to grow corals but also care how everything else looks too, like I do. Then you'll need some white, red and cyan/green. How much of those is up to personal preference. Unless you're acclimating, anything above 470nm and the white is where you should tinker and leave everything below 470nm alone. There is a little PUR from what blue is in the white spectrums, but unless you really crank them up it won't effect your initial settings too much if at all.

My plan to setup my lights is to tune them with a Par meter in the UV thru Blue (380-410 if you have those spectrums in your fixture, to 470nm). Once the par is where I want from top to bottom of the tank I'll add in the white, red & cyan/green till I like what I see.
 
Thank you for the great replies!
I don’t have big super expensive Lights but what I have is decent. I really just look at the corals for happiness and adjust them in the tank. I’ve got some fish but like the fluorescent look of the corals.
I would prefer considerably more blue than white but have always worried about spectrum.
 
This might be anecdotal, but I’ve always been more successful at growing SPS when incorporating warm white spectrum rather than just blue. Even back in MH days, XM10k grew coral better for me than XM20k or Radiums. Nowadays, LED fixtures favor cool white for some reason and in my experience they don’t add add much value other than just making things look better to the eye. Things are much more complicated now because each LED fixture uses different compositions of LEDs etc. Anyway, I thought I’d throw it out there.

Edit: Btw, back in the mid 2000s, lots of people used XM10k's (very yellow bulbs) for best acro growth, and then used blue T5 supplementation for looks. Weird how things change.
 
Last edited:
Like some others already said. All depends on what's in the tank. I'm running a mixed reef Red Sea XL200 and light settings are 80% blue, 20% white fading down during the day with simulated clouds during the first few hours. Every creature seems happy with the settings including myself. :)
 
I run a Nano-Box over my 20g and it’s a nice blue. I don’t run whites at all. Here’s the channels and levels that it hits most of the day.

09193BB1-920F-4ACA-AB6F-055F7A41BBEE.png
 
Back
Top