- When you're getting started with a reef tank,
there's a lot of information that comes at you fast.
You have to worry about pH, food, coral food,
amino acids, a skimmer,
and you know thousands of kinds of skimmers, so which one?
Lighting, LEDs, T5s, metal halides, natural sunlight,
solar tubes, the options are endless,
and you can be successful with billions
of potential combinations of equipment and technique.
Your reef tank is going to be as unique as you,
but that doesn't mean
that some research won't help you be successful.
Hi, guys and girls, I'm ReefMan, and this week
we're going to do a beginners guide on reef tank lighting,
and if you're in a rush well,
just buy any well-rated reef oriented commercial light,
don't just get it at Home Depot, get it at Bulk Reef Supply,
your local fish store, something like that,
run it 12 hours on, 12 hours off,
whatever the coral growth mode it's got, it'll work, done.
I hope you enjoyed the video.
If you've got more time,
then reef lighting really can be that simple at it's core.
Modern lighting fixtures like those from AI, Orphek,
Ecotech Marine, Kessil,
and others all come with basic settings
that are going to work really well on most reef tanks.
Note, all those vendors are making LED lights
and yes for a beginner, I would recommend using an LED light
over your reef tank.
They're more common, more people work with them now.
There are other lighting options that you have.
Myself, I started out with metal halide lights
a couple decades ago.
They work really well, they're the gold standard
for reef lights, but they use a lot of electricity
and they get very hot.
Metal halide lights are not programmable
or customizable, like an LED or maybe even a T5 light is,
and the only choice you really have,
is going to be the overall wattage
and what bulb you're going to use.
Different metal halide bulbs put out different spectra
of light, that's just different color of light.
From researching for this video,
in coral growth tests it seems like about 14K
and above, 14 and 20,000 is going
to produce the most growth for Acropora.
Now that's mostly a white light
with a little bit of a blue tint to it,
and a really common metal halide bulb
that you might buy, in a 14K model is made by Phoenix.
Often times LED manufacturers are going to have a program
that uses a color temperature around 14K as well,
it could be called AB+ or coral growth
or maybe even Phoenix.
A 20K light, that's 20,000 Kelvin light
that's a much more blue light.
It's also produced good Acropora growth in the study
and might make your tank a bit more colorful,
but really as long as your mostly toward the blue end
of the light spectrum, your reef tank is going
to do well for you.
There is another lighting technology that's out there,
which is really common and it's called T5.
T5 are thin fluorescent tubes
that come in a variety of colors.
If you particularly like mixing different colors,
different bulbs, you'll be able
to get exactly the light that you want
and a T5 fixture, like ones made by ATI
and other companies like that, can't be beat if you like
that kind of thing.
As you buy the individual bulbs that are going
to go into it, you can mix and match the different bulbs
to get the overall color you want.
T5s have a really even spread of color throughout the tank,
which helps prevent shadows and things like that,
which can plague Acropora as their branches grow
and shade other parts of the coral.
Metal halide lights and for sure LED lights,
tend to produce varying degrees
of disco ball effect in your tank.
Particularly if you're using a light like a Kessil Pendant,
which is a single source point of light,
you're going to see this in your tank.
Some people really like the disco ball effect,
some people hate it.
It is something to be aware of though,
if you're shopping for a really small pendant style light.
When you first add corals to your tank,
you might want to reduce the output of your lights somewhat.
A nine week acclimation period for new Acropora,
reduced deaths by about 50% in a study that I saw.
You can reduce the overall time that your lights run
or if your lights are dimmable like most LEDs,
then you can simply turn them down for a few weeks,
and then ramp them back up slowly to their normal setting.
PAR, photosynthetically active radiation is actually
what matters to the coral.
Most coral that we keep in our aquariums gets a lot
of it's food and nutrients from tiny microscopic things
called dinoflagellates, that live in their tissue
and those little critters are going to use light
to make their food, just like a plant would.
You probably won't have anyway to measure PAR
if you're just starting out in the hobby,
but you can look at charts online,
and you'll want somewhere around 250 to 300 or more
for more stony corals like Acropora.
Soft corals, Zoanthids, Xenia, things like that,
can do well with much lower levels of light,
so keep that in mind if you don't want to buy
such an expensive light right off the bat.
Lighting is one of those things that you need
to get right in a reef tank.
It is the source of a lot of the energy
that the animals that we put in a reef tank need to survive.
Thankfully in general, it's pretty easy
to get a good light these days
due to the huge number of really high quality fixtures
put out by all the different vendors,
like the ones I've mentioned in this video.
You're also already doing this, so keep up,
and do research, and you'll be well on your way
to an awesome reef tank.
Thanks for watching.
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so hit that subscribe button and have a great day, bye!