Cali Kid Corals

Light recommendations

I need a little guidance - Thinking about upgrading the light on Peter's 29g bowfront to LED. Currently he is running 2 - 24 inch Flour. I want him to be able to see his corals glow under actinic and have a bit of programming. His tank is 24" wide and 14" front to back and 20" deep. He has a mix of SPS, LPS and softies. Budget is a factor. Any ideas???
Thanks!
 
for a 29? id think a 160 would be good

I run a 350W on my 24 gallon nanocube, so a similar sized tank. I run at about 50% each channel and am happy with it. But you are right a 160 could work too. And you can run a kessil spectral controller with that light for programmability, something that you cannot do with the A350 (but you can with the A360). When I was doing my research though, it seemed the majority leaned to a A350/A360 over the a 160 for that sized tank.
 
You can build something pretty cool from rapid really easy. Kinda fun. Pretty cheap.
You want warm and or neutral white mixed with cool white and some blues like royal blue. I like to throw in the near uv low 400 nanometer blues as well.
You can get two 18" heat sinks with pre tapped holes for leds to screw into and you can get leds that don't even need to be soldered.
They don't look real fancy but they work well and look good in tank
 
Just get some cheapo chinese blackbox leds. The frag tank that my buddy set up is 24x22x14 and he runs 1 over the tank. Cost was something like $70 initially and then he swapped out 2 of the leds for violets. Grows and colors sps well.
 
Just get some cheapo chinese blackbox leds. The frag tank that my buddy set up is 24x22x14 and he runs 1 over the tank. Cost was something like $70 initially and then he swapped out 2 of the leds for violets. Grows and colors sps well.
Did he remove the reds?
 
Just get some cheapo chinese blackbox leds. The frag tank that my buddy set up is 24x22x14 and he runs 1 over the tank. Cost was something like $70 initially and then he swapped out 2 of the leds for violets. Grows and colors sps well.


Can you show me which one he got?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
MarsAqua and he think he pulled both the reds and greens and swapped them out for UV. He didn't remember exactly lol.

I asked him about it and he actually likes his wife's setup better. Didn't need any mods and it was plug and play out of the bag. Hers is the Galaxyhydro from Amazon for $100 shipped.
 
For $300.00 I'd recommend one of two things. A used Kessil 360 runs about $250-275 and are fairly easy to find. Or a new Reefbright XHO (not tech) 24" strip. The RB strip grows corals amazingly well and adds almost 200 PAR in a very consistent coverage. It's the perfect supplement for T5's. And the corals sparkle! I'll be running two of them with my T5's on my new tank.
 
Well if you want to get your hands dirty and build something RapidLED has a sale on their (older?) Aurora pucks for $65 each. These are basically Ecotech Radion knock off boards, not sure which generation though, but with 4 channels to control you can make something neat. Or if you don't want to think about what parts you need they have a number of kits, you still need to build them but they are all solderless, for less than $300, although the programming aspect typically drives the price up.

If you want off the shelf ready to go, that's a bit harder since even one of the cheaper brand name ones (something like the Razor or Ethereal) still go above that $300 price point. Getting a cheap "black box" setup could work, not sure how much programming you can do with them though. Another option as mentioned is to get a strip LED light "accent lighting" and use that in conjunction with the fluorescent bulbs.
 
A lot of good recommendations, I am not mentally capable of building my own so I will try to get one that is ready to go. If I buy a Kessill, do I still need to buy some type of controller?
 
No, you can manually adjust the color lighting and stuff and have it just on a simple timer. the controller is nicer though because the lights can ramp up and down. Like I start mine at 7:00 really blue then full intensity at like 12, then start to ramp down at 6
 
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