Lighting intensity for frag tank

[Eck36]

Starting a frag tank with a 40g breeder. I have a Reef Radiance Starfire laying around, I took it off the DT because somehow it's time got reversed (sunrise at night, moonlights during the day) but since my frag tank is in a storage room and the coral doesn't care what time it is I figured it will work fine. Since the frag tank is shallow compared to the DT (93 cube), I don't want to run it at the factory auto settings. The light is 15"-18" above the water and i will be growing out mainly LPS and soft coral with a random LPS occasionally. My question is how intense should I set the lights so I don'y fry the coral?

 

[DaveK]

This is almost a "trick question". Because we usually consider soft corals and LPS to only require low light, we don't think we can keep them under high light.

The think you don't want to do is to make a rapid transition form dim lighting to bright lighting, or bright lighting to dim lighting.

I'd say start your lighting fairly dim and ramp it up slowly. As long as the corals are happy and you don't have algae issues, your ok. If you then need to add more corals that were in dim light you can lower the light or just place a piect of plastic window screen ot two so it shades the new corals.

Lighting has a lot of variables to it and each tank is different, so you need to do a bit of trial and error testing to get your tank just right.

 

[Eck36]

I knew the question didn't have an easy answer as soon as I posted it. The corals will be coming out of the DT which is fairly intense. I just want to thin out some corals by fragging and then grow them out for trade at the LFS. The tank is long enough that I should really have 2 lights, so I could just move the light to one end and keep the LPS over there and the few SPS I have can go directly under the light.