Lighting help?

[muggle0981]

Tank is 180g-mixed reef lps/soft

I have 3 radion g5 xr15 pro

Looking to add some supplemental lighting for shadows and what now-recomendations

Par using s par meter was roughly 80 ish o. Sandbed

About 120-150 mid

And 180-200 at top of aquarium

 

[Fish Styx]

The XR15's really aren't that powerful, especially for a 180. I would either a) replace them with XR30's; b) go LED / T5 hybrid; or c) add LED light bars.

 

[muggle0981]

Yes-lfs when we set up recomendded the xr15-they didnt think xr30 were necessary


All coral are good-growing but bot crazy growning

 

[DanyL]

I mean, it’s not a lot of PAR, but for a softy/LPS tank it should be fine.

If you are planning to introduce SPS later on, I wouldn’t invest in fill light right now, but rather upgrade right away, which would eventually save some money.
You could even keep the XR15s as fill lights and add 2 ReeFi Uno 2.0 which would cost you the same as adding a single XR30 to the mix.

But if you aren’t into SPS at all - adding a couple of LED bars like the Quanta’s, OR3 or blades should be more than enough for your purpose.

 

[X-37B]

Pics?
Add another xr15. You could easily do 6 but start with one and see how it looks and go from their.
You should be able to find used for a good price.
Bars are good but I would just add more 15's since you have them already.
A T5 hybrid like mine would work too.
This is 5 xr15's, on a 48" hybrid.
I was gojng to use this on my 60×30×22 but ulitmately I went with different leds for my display and use the 15's for my new frag system.

 

[muggle0981]

Here’s pics of tank-let me know if anything looks not happy-

Not going to go into sps

 

[muggle0981]

Maybe adding another xr 15 pro cold be way to go

 

[X-37B]

Maybe adding another xr 15 pro cold be way to go

Looks great! Add another 15 and you shoukd be good to go.

 

[DanyL]

Here’s pics of tank-let me know if anything looks not happy-

Not going to go into sps

Tank looks good and healthy.

If anything - I would say that you don’t really need any lighting, but rather a haircut to some of the bigger leathers because in the next year they’ll start taking over and no matter how much light you’ll add now, it wouldn’t help much to the corals beneath it.

However, if you’d like to hold on with fragging for now - I would add a single, angled bar on the front which would better fill the area that actually lacking right now.

Adding another XR15 would mostly help with spread length wise, which from what I can tell isn’t as necessary as the front.

 

[muggle0981]

Giving s haircut to leathers-simply just cutting them at base to thin out?

 

[DanyL]

So the way I do it is by taking it out of the tank, placing it upside down on a cutting board and using a sharp meat knife to cut the outer part of the leather into multiple stripes, then each stripe is split into equal squares and mounted to a rock/plug/shell.

Here you can see it right before fragging.

And here are about half of the frags that haven’t been sold yet and already grown up since the cutting.

You can also use scissors inside the tank itself if you can easily reach it and it’s not too thick for the scissors to cut.

As for mounting methods - there are plenty, using a combination of glue and low flow, a box with rubble, rubber bands and more.
I suggest reading more about it and experimenting with it yourself because each has its own preference.

 

[MrGisonni]

Here’s pics of tank-let me know if anything looks not happy-

Not going to go into sps

Tank looks awesome. If you really want to tinker a bit, I would look into some led bars for fill, pop and a little extra par.

 

[MrGisonni]

Here’s pics of tank-let me know if anything looks not happy-

Not going to go into sps

Tank looks awesome. If you really want to tinker a bit,I would look into some led bars for fill, pop and a little extra par.