Little help with light

[LaDonnaVonD]

I have Al 32 HD lights and the schedule I have on is David Saxbys. My husband said I need more blue in my 60 gallon tank. Can I get some feed back on where you keep your lights . My tank has been doing good

Thank you
LaDonna

 

[Justin Ranke]

I remember when I was using single puck I had it turned up to Max on a 32, So I would imagine if its a 60 Cube, you would be fine cranking it up some more. Truthfully the blue spectrum doesn't increase par all that much, so I am sure you probably won't have any issues increasing it, but I would recommend renting a par meter first just to play it safe. LED can be difficult to dial in.

 

[dball711]

Actually increasing the blue spectrum will have a decent impact on PUR (photosynthetic usable Radiation). Light visible to us really has little impact on usable PAR to our corals. What I mean by this is that a tank lit by mainly blue/UV spectrum will not look like it has much PAR as a tank lit by less Blue/UV and more white/yellow light.

Let’s make up some number to help visualize the point I’m making in the above example. Let’s say we measure PAR on your tank with the light setting you have now and get PAR reading of 200 and PUR reading of 65% at 10” in your tank. Now we turn up your Blues and UV and retake PAR and PUR readings again. Both readings should go up, PAR slightly but more significantly PUR. For the sake of comparison let’s assume PAR stays constant but PUR increases to 75%. This would result in an increase of usable PAR from 130 to 150, if we included the change in PAR then this difference would be greater.

White/yellow light is efficiently used for photosynthesis in plants (algae) and blue/uv light is efficiently used for photosynthesis in corals.

My thought is add more blue light and back off on the whites to only what’s needed for your personal viewing preference. Personally I run my tanks with no white/yellow spectrum but that’s my preference. Also I see less chance of undesirable algae outbreaks.

Just my thoughts, hope this helps.

 

[msporleder]

I have Al 32 HD lights and the schedule I have on is David Saxbys. My husband said I need more blue in my 60 gallon tank. Can I get some feed back on where you keep your lights . My tank has been doing good

Thank you
LaDonna

If it has been doing good then don't change it!