(casual music plays)
- Today on BRS TV Reef FAQs we answer,
how high should I mount these lights?
It's not what you've been told.
(upbeat music plays)
Hey I'm Ryan with BRS TV Reef FAQS,
a resource for quick, straight to the point answers,
and realizing that dream reef tank.
Today, how high do I mount these LED lights
on my reef tank?
I'm a tell you right now,
forget what most of the manufacturers have told you,
because it's probably wrong for your tank.
This is a challenge all of us have run into
and it's hard to know what the right
answer is because the advice or instructions
are often conflicting.
That's because every single tank is different
in size, shape, depth, what's in it,
the lights themselves, and how they're used.
There is no one size fits all answer.
So today we're gonna give you a quick,
easy to use method that you can adjust
to your tank and desires, with the human eye,
and a bit of intuition, everyone can find
a near-perfect mounting height for your
individual tank and lighting solution.
Keep in mind that mounting height does have
an impact on maximum PAR, but most people
use the sliders and knobs in their lights
to adjust PAR intensity.
Mounting height is more about the spread,
even distribution of light,
which is arguably more important.
So the first thing you note is the opposing
forces at play here.
The higher you mount the LED lights,
the better the spread and quality of light will be.
Meaning with every inch that you move the LED lights up,
it will reduce PAR hotspots, increase spread,
reduce shadowing, blend the spectrums of the individual
LEDs better, and get closer to that even blanket
of uniform spectrum light that we're looking
to provide for the reef tank.
However the inverse of that is the higher you go,
the more spill you get into the room.
Meaning rather than entering the tank,
the light is illuminating the floor, wall,
or anything near the tank.
These lights are not cheap,
so the idea of half the light not even entering
the tank is not just visually unappealing in the room,
but also expensive and inefficient.
This is something you can see in our BRS TV
and best PH where when you raise the lights up,
the distribution always gets better and more even.
But the average PAR across the entire tank
always drops.
So where's that nexus or balance of these
two things for you and how high should
you mount your lightS?
First I'd use the manufacturer as a general guideline,
but after that, it's more about your tank's shape
and how close you put your lights is more
of a personal priority than anything.
They're two common priorities.
The first is I'd like to light the tank in the most
efficient or economic manner.
Meaning purchase the fewest lights possible
and consume the least amount of energy possible.
Assuming you picked a light with a light spread
or foot print that matches your tank,
the goal in this case is to get as much of that
light into the tank and as little into
the room as possible.
So that just means raising the lights up
until there's signs that there's significant
spill onto the wall or room.
You might not get perfect distribution this way,
but that might not be required
for your desired tank.
For instance, LPS, softees, zoanthid, mushroom,
and even some mixed tanks with well-placed SPS
are just less dependent on providing perfectly
blended blankets of difficult to shadow light.
However the other common priority is lighting
the tank in a manner which maximizes
the spectral qualities of blending
the individual spectrums, distribution of light,
and benefits of that even blanket of PAR.
More often than not,
this is often related to a wall-to-wall
SPS tank where coral shadowing themselves
and their neighbors are a big issue.
Almost every longterm, epic SPS tank puts a ton
of attention into an ideal lighting solution.
In this case, I'd just say raise the lights
until there's an unacceptable spill into the room.
For instance, WWC hangs their LEDS anywhere from
16 to 24 inches off the surface of the water
on their displays.
This is done with light distribution,
even intensity, reduction of hotspots,
spectrum blending in mind, not maximal efficiency,
or lowest initial cost.
The concept of raising and lowering the lights
based on acceptable coverage
and spill into the room isn't groundbreaking,
but it's way more useful and actionable advice
than a generic answer of eight inches,
for any size, shape, or type of tank.
One caveat to this is with LEDs you can use
multiple smaller lights sources and spread them out
over a larger area and run them much closer
to the surface with many of the same benefits.
We did investigate with the AI Primes a while back,
which shows the PAR distribution from a single
row of AI Primes to multiples rows,
and in the end, I think this is one of the installs
with the nexus of reasonable economics
and ideal performance met.
All this data was part of the evolution
of everything that we've learned about
lighting a reef tank properly.
In fact, I think this year was one of the biggest
leaps forward that we've made.
The reef tank lighting (casual music playing)
made simple stable episode
of the BRS WWC hybrid method was easily
one of the most inclusive,
easy-to-follow lighting episode that we've
ever done.
Particularly if lighting an SPS tank is on your mind,
I guarantee that you'll learn something
that benefits your tank.
See ya next Wednesday with the next batch
or BRS TV Reef FAQS.