Perpetual newbie here in need of a mentor

[thewarbrd]

OK, round 1 of PAR tinkering is complete. I'm by no means an expert with this meter but I guess a ballpark is better than nopark

Sorry for the wide pics, but FTS to show where I took readings:

alt="" />

And chart with readings, what's where, and what bulbs and the order. The last 4 were with the sensor just breaking the surface, I'm thinking I hosed up the reading on the procolor, for it to be so low but the new bulbs not gaining much PAR over the old ones. But anyway, the new bulbs had been lit for about 2 hours befor their reading.

alt="" />

The new ones are almost an even swap for 5 month old bulbs. Not exactly thrilled with the color, that 14k is way too white for me, guess I got used to the procolor being in there. I'm going to horse around with the order and see what I can get out of things. Probably be offering up some cheap bulbs in the FS section soon cause I think I'm going to stick with ATI long term..

 

[thewarbrd]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting stellar numbers but A) I wanted to know ballparks so I could see what kinds of things I could realistically place in certain spots and keep them happy, and B) to see what kind of shape my ATI's were in and compare the icecaps to them.

Looking back in the thread and talking to others, I think I'm in the boat Barbara was in. One of the biggest culprits in my situation is believed to be the fact that until I took my glass tops off at the beginning of June and replaced them with mesh (I was planning to buy a chiller knowing I had temp issues) the tank spent most of march-may hovering between 80-84, with the average being 82-83. The "expelling one temp tolerant zooxanthellae to replace with another" as has been described to me is mentioned in this write up here http://www.marinebiology.org/coralbleaching.htm">http://www.marinebiology.org/coralbleaching.htm</a> and it seems like a viable cause for me looking back at my logs... as my coral bleached and became impacted by the temps I assumed too much light and didn't look for other causes for my shrinking other than parms and pests.

Now that I have temps under control (I've compared 3 different analog and digital thermometers, and they all read within 1 degree of each other), and I will be increasing slowly over the next week or so to a 10 hour photo period as well as feeding small amounts of live phyto every few days to help the corals along while their zooxanthellae recovers and repopulates, I should be on the road to recovery. I still may look into a chiller to pull temps down to a more solid 76-78 as that's where I kept it in the winter months when everything was rocking.

Thanks all for your wonderful feedback and support and helping me learn and grow, it's awesome to have this kind of support and experience at your fingertips!