What's your lighting schedule ?!
 

Hey everyone,

I just wondering if any standards are for lighting schedule or it is something personal!

Here is mine :

Moonlight 7am - 9am , 10pm-11pm
Actinic 9am - 10pm
Main lights 12pm - 8pm

Thanks

Most people will run actinics or blues 12 hours a day give or take, some people up to 14 hours. The whites/halides are where you will see the biggest difference. Some people don't separate blues from whites or just use purely halides with no actinic supplementation. So you will get some people running whites or halides up to 14 hours as well. For those separating them most people run the whites/halides 6-10 hours, with the "usual" being 8 hours.

In the wild, most of the critters in our tanks come from oceans relatively close to the equator so their days are pretty close to 12 hours light, and 12 hours dark. The light doesn't vary much more than 13:11. Keep that in mind when you're thinking of your lighting schedule.

Personally, I have experimented with actinics 10-14 hours, and halides 6-8 hours. I honestly note absolutely no difference in growth, color, or general health of my tank. So I run actinics for 12 hours, and halides for 6 hours. This way my halides will go longer before needing to be changed out. I will often run the actinics for 13 hours in the winter just to add some light to our short winter days!

Moonlight 10pm - 2:30am 5am - 12pm
T5's 12pm - 11pm
Main Lights 2:30pm - 8:30pm - random day chosen once a week where main lights are not turned on.

Thanks myka for great explanation and thank you madreefer :)

I am changing my main lights from pc to MH , I guess I should decrease my main light from 8 Hours to 6 , 2pm on 8pm off.

Is moonlight effects on anything or it is just for beauty and those not matter when goes on and off?

actinics: 3pm till 10pm
metal halides: 4pm till 9pm

no point in lights being on when no one is home

Just finished up my arduino project, so my lighting schedule is set to the sunrise/sunset times in the gold coast. Means shorter days in summer(Their winter). i have it offset by 4 hours so sunrise is about 11am now, sunset at 11pm. atinics are on for 1 hour after sunrise, then one MH turns on for 70% of the daylight time. for the last 70% the other MH is on followed by a 1 hour dusk with only actinics.

Do i think it will help my coral grow better? honestly? no. But i was bored, and this seemed pretty cool.

You're welcome. :)

When you are changing from a lower light setup to a much higher light setup you will want to go very slowly. Start off with only an hour or two of halide, and increase it by a half hour every 2-4 days watching how your corals are doing. Watch for shrunken flesh in LPS, and bleaching. Usually corals will bleach slowly when it comes to more light than they are used to, so if you see bleaching the problem has been happening for a few days already, so you would need to cut back by at least an hour before ramping up again even slower.

Moonlights are aesthetic. It is well known that spawning activity and many other behaviors are linked to the moon's phases. So moonlights came along, and people quickly realized that it is the gravitational pull of the moon's phases, not the actual light provided by the moon that affects the ocean's inhabitants.

moonlights: 9am to 10am/10pm to 11pm
T5's: 10am to 10pm
MH's: noon to 8pm

This would be my light systems change plan from PC to MH :

2Pm to 8Pm :

15 min ON 45 Min OFF for week 1
30 min ON 30 Min OFF for week 2
same for week 3
45 ON 15 OFF week 4
same for week 5
Full time on after that.

How is that sounds?

LED moonlight 24 / 7
quad lamp T5

KZ fiji purple / superblue (one each ) 11:00 -10:30
KZ new gen / superblue (one each) 11:30 - 10:00

Why would you complicate it like that? :lol: That's a lot of messing around with timers! For lights, I just use the cheap $8 timers that have those little tabs that you move around. So to move a tab over a half hour takes a whopping 3 seconds. To mess around with several on/off settings in a day would be a pain in the butt. Doesn't really matter how you do it though.

What kind of corals do you have? You probably don't have to take 5 weeks to make the switch.

dimmable LED, reefkeeper elite with ALC and lunar similation pods

blues 11 am to 10 pm
whites 12:30 pm to 8:30 pm

I am using 15min tab timers , it is not that hard to configure the time for that, I really dont want to bleach any of LPSs

This is mt tank :

http://i735.photobucket.com/albums/w...ys_Version.jpg

Rose BTA , Green BTA, Elegance , Torch , Hammer , Frogspawn, Zoa, Mushrooms , Ricordia , Lobo ,
Mostly LPS and soft corals .

Current lighting is : 2x 55w 50/50 10,000k T5 + 2 x 18w Actinic T5 = 146W new one is :
New Lighting systems is : 1x 250W DE HQI Bulb 15000K 4x 24W T5 Actinic Blue = 346W!

it is more than double that's why I am really worried about this change

You can control the intensity by adjusting height instead of time, put you lights up on blocks and slowly lower it down to your tank. The on/off on the halides are generally not good. Not saying that you're going to break it, just shorten life (the amount for 5 weeks might be so little that it's not worth worrying about)

Mine is like so:

Actinics: 10am-11pm
"Whites": 11am-10pm
Moonlights: 11pm-6am

Now, if it weren't for the fridays, saturdays and sunday when we're all home, I'd fire everything up a little later, but I like to go down and tinker in the mornings on the weekends. (My wife calls it obsessing... lol)

Oh ,So you have your moonlights ON all night

Yup. funny thing about the world... the moon is out all night... and the SUN IS ON ALL DAY.

I like that ,but I thought the fishes dont like it