[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Canadian

Steve,

. When you were standing on your soap box about MH a few months ago you pounded your chest about getting over 1000 PAR at the surface and 500 on the bottom of the tank. Clearly, the numbers being reported here don't fall in line with what you've purported constitutes adequate PAR for your SPS tanks.
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yup, I did, and I have no doubt that if Ron put 40 degree optics on his fixture, at 3" he would blow away my MH. and just to add to it my MH were unusaualy high output which was a combanation of the right ballast, my own design for the reflector and good bulbs. in the 25 MH setups I tested the only one that came close was a 400 watt sona agro ballast running iwasaki 6500K bulbs and it was still only slightly over 800.

so I can safly say that a good LED set up such as Ron's will blow any T5 out of the watter, most 150 watt setups, and some of the 250 watt setups. if he would have gone a little tighter spacing which allowed for 40 degree optics with out spotlighting I can say you would be hard to find a MH system that would be a higher output, and it would be pointless to try as at that output level would it realy matter?

Is this because you spent to much on your T5 set up and are haveing buyers regrets Andrew? don't worry I spent close to 10K on lighting in 2 years befor I found something I was happy with myself. now I did recover some of that selling reflectors and reflector material, but still spent way to much on lighting.. thats why the new tank is going to have LED lighting, as it will give me the ability to change color K value on a whim, and also talyor the intensity to what I have in the tank at the moment. if I get a bunch of new frags, I can dial it down and have it increase slowly over a week or two to prevent bleaching. I can have a gradualy sunrise/sunset instead of a two stage on/off. plus the most fun is building the stuff now keeping the tank going.. maybe I should just build systems for people who want a tank but dont want to build it then I could just keep on doing the fun stuff .

Steve