found this older post when I was looking for suggestions on moonlight on my tank, currently leave on all night and was wondering if that was good or not. I see Archit mentioned doing some testing with multiple tanks but do not see any conclusions/recommendations from the survey or if the test was ever conducted and curious as it was a cool idea and wonder if it was followed through.
I don't follow the moon cycle, my timers allow me to simulate moonlight but it is a manual change to the timer settings to alter the cycle so I just leave them on.
I had the Ocean Revive LED's only which were a more blue moon light with a lot of glow from the corals and 2 weeks ago added a Reefbreeder photon 32" so now I have moved the Ocean revives OR IT2040 to each end of my 180 with RB Photon in the middle. The moonlight is much nicer from the RB not quite as blue but the corals still glow just the same, looks more natural to me so the ocean revives are on for 1 hour after lights out and the RB moonlights stay on all night and just wondering if I should consider cutting that back some.
The test was pretty in-conclusive at our house because this was around the time when we were looking into retail locations; so didn't get a chance to carry out to it's entirety. However we are doing this experiment again at our shop -- if you peek in through the window in our shop during night time, you'll see some tanks don't have any moonlights, a couple have bluer moon lights, and yet another couple of violet moon lights.
It's not been long enough to say much about what's working better or not:
- Our 125g tank facing the fish systems, which houses our favias, chalices, etc does
not have any
moon lights on it. My chalices in this tank are doing good -- decent growth
- Our last frag tank (closest to the 300g) has
violet moon lights, and one of my favorite chalice that I've had for over 2 years (not for sale) has finally started taking off after being badly damaged during the move.
- Our middle frag tank has
blue moon lights and I haven't seen any substantial growth on the chalices in this tank yet.
Please keep in mind, our test was designed to test the usefulness of "pods" ... and this theory hit me when we started adding rotifers, copepods etc to our home made food, and saw great color and puffiness response from our corals within 2 days. Our systems still being new, and our refugiums still being offline, we do not yet have the abundance of pods that I would like to be able to "truly" test the theory ... hopefully our refugiums will be online soon and we'll see better results
Thank you for bringing this thread up -- I had completely forgotten about it.
- Archit