How long to run LED's

[RDrink25]

I am running my LED's at full power for 11hrs a day. Should I be just running the blues for a portion of that? Currently I run them all at full blast. It is this kit Red Sea MAX 130/130D - Modular LED.ca.

 

[whippetguy]

I would say that it all depends on how your livestock is doing. If everything is going well, don't rock the boat.



Sent from John's Tapatalk

 

[BigAl07]

I'm with John. If your coral are happy then you're good to go so long as you don't kick off an algae bloom.

Here's how I run mine (same lights on the same tank)

• 10am - 11am blues start ramping up from 0% to 40%
• 11am - Noon whites start ramping up from 0% to 40%
• 12:00pm - 12:30pm Whites and blues ramp up simultaneously to 75%
• 12:30pm - 6:30pm whites and blues steady at 75% (doesn't take into account cloudy days or thunderstorms which are random)
• 6:30pm - 7:00pm whites and blues ramp down simultaneously to 40%
• 7:00pm - 8:00pm whites ramp down to 0%
• 8:00pm - 9:00pm blues ramp down to 1%
• 9:00pm - 11pm blues stay constant at approx 1% (this is one of our favorite time to view the tank because most of the coral go into FEEDING mode and have great tentacle/polyp extension and this is when I feed 1x a week)
• 11pm a 20 minute thunderstorm kicks in gear and I sit enjoying my tank pretty much every night.
• 11:20pm tank goes into NIGHT mode... and remains this way until the start of the next day which is 10am (start the cycle over again)this may be completely dark, fractional moonlight, or FULL moonlight depending on the day of the month and the exact location/intensity of the moon at that time. I have a "SimuL" LED light-stick that accurately replicates the moon phase precisely to my geographic location and time.

As you can tell I like to start my blues early and then bring my whites online and then reverse for the sunset period.