light required by diferent corals

[reefburnaby]

Hi,

HQI vs Regular. I would get 250W HQIs... 150W HQIs aren't that much more cheaper. Its expensive...but the colour is unbelievable. This is important if you want to keep non-brown, green or orange SPS. Colours like blue and purple do better in HQIs than Iwasaki.

As for how much light does SPS need....there are a couple of papers on reefs.org that explain this in greater detail. PAR doesn't give you all the info if you really want to optimize your lighting for corals. This is because some corals prefer different wavelengths -- PAR doesn't take this in to account. Also, corals can adapt to the availble light energy...which makes your job even tougher.

- Victor.