I'm so one the fence about lighting. I love the controllability of LED's so much. Thinking the ramping up/down is more natural. Sunrise/sunset aspect.
Still unsure of actual par longevity on them though. How long does say the Radion actually last?
But I remember the beautiful color & growth I had in my 26g from the T5's. I also know that ramping T5's lowers the life of the bulbs big time. I don't remember ever seeing the bulbs on sale. I wasn't a big fan of having to change them out either.
So Marty, for LED's what would you recommend for my 40B?
I'm looking very closely at the MaxSpec R420R Razor. Really like it.
OK, so as far as the leds are concerned, they life of them are still up in the air. Somewhere between 5 and 10 years?
I have not seen any threads anywhere about individual leds going out or needing to be replaced on Radion fixtures. How long have they been out now? 5-6+ years?
Not sure exactly.
However I have seen people talking about having to replace individual leds on Chinese black box led fixtures.
So I guess maybe a quality issue.
The ramp up and down is nice.
I forgot to mention I had Carlos ( seedlessinseattle ) make me a small led string with 10 leds on it. 2 are uv and 8 are blue. It has 2 ballasts and the one with most of the blues on it went out. So I do have a short period with 3 leds ( 2 uv and 1 blue) that come on about 45 minutes before any T5's and stay on for about a half hour after the last T5's go out.
THe first T5's that come on are 2 Blue Plus. Then a hour later the other 4 come on.
So I do have a choppy ramp up and down.
But when I decided to give T5's another go, I thought about the smooth ramp up and down the Radion fixtures give, I remembered back to using just mh lighting or just VHO or the combination of the 2, and my first venture with T5's.
I used those light sources for 15+ years and with them the light was almost instant on ( took maybe 5-10 minutes to fully power up) and they grew coral just fine.
People still use them and have hugely successful sps reefs.
So I don't think the ramp up and down is necessary for growing coral.
So when I had the Radion gen 3 over my 50 gallon tank and started getting back into zoanthids, they just didn't do well. Even putting a effort into keeping them in the shade and acclimating them.
So I went back to T5's., and at first I wasn't happy. I even bought another Radion fixture and considered going back to leds on this tank. But I guess maybe 2-3 weeks ago it kind of hit me. The tank was really starting to look good. Zoanthid growing was up. Color was good. The few chalices I have were growing.
