EchoPear
Community Member
Greetings!
When searching for a light for my first tank (5G Marineland Portrait) I wanted something small like the Kessil A80 and much cheaper. I stumbled across the Hygger 30W light on Amazon which retails for $39.99. It is essentially a rebranded Chinese light being sold in the states (just search 30W reef led on AliExpress)
The goal of my tank is to be an LPS/Softie Tank. So I’m shooting for 50-150 in the tank, but trying to trend towards the lower side.
After my Dipsastraea began looking worse and worse I rented a PAR meter from LFS. Turns out I was blasting it with way too much light! This little light packs a serious punch!
The basic modes of this light are 5 brightness settings and 3 spectrum settings. Brightness goes 10%, 32%, 55%, 77%, 100%. Spectrum options are an Actinic mode (blues purples and one green I think), everything in the Actinic plus the rest of the white LEDs (full spectrum), and a third mode that is full whites and half power actinic.
Below are the settings I finally settled on after lots of tweaking light height and brightness levels. All the measurements were taken with an Apogee meter and the Lid off with my flow at what it normally is. I did notice roughly a 5-10% drop in PAR across the places I could reach with the lid on. Sticking with the 7” 3/5 power for now, when I first turned it on I had it at 4/5 6.5” away… think I was blasting my coral with 180+! If long term the 7” distance doesn’t seem high enough I can lower a half inch at a time to get a small boost. I actually struggled getting a gradient with 100-120 at top and 50-60 on bottom which is what I wanted. Level 2 was basically the same ratios but even lower all around.
Tank is 14 in tall with a 1” sand bed and water line 1” below the top. Light distance was measured from water surface to the bottom of the hood flare
This light could easily grow SPS at level 5!
When searching for a light for my first tank (5G Marineland Portrait) I wanted something small like the Kessil A80 and much cheaper. I stumbled across the Hygger 30W light on Amazon which retails for $39.99. It is essentially a rebranded Chinese light being sold in the states (just search 30W reef led on AliExpress)
The goal of my tank is to be an LPS/Softie Tank. So I’m shooting for 50-150 in the tank, but trying to trend towards the lower side.
After my Dipsastraea began looking worse and worse I rented a PAR meter from LFS. Turns out I was blasting it with way too much light! This little light packs a serious punch!
The basic modes of this light are 5 brightness settings and 3 spectrum settings. Brightness goes 10%, 32%, 55%, 77%, 100%. Spectrum options are an Actinic mode (blues purples and one green I think), everything in the Actinic plus the rest of the white LEDs (full spectrum), and a third mode that is full whites and half power actinic.
Below are the settings I finally settled on after lots of tweaking light height and brightness levels. All the measurements were taken with an Apogee meter and the Lid off with my flow at what it normally is. I did notice roughly a 5-10% drop in PAR across the places I could reach with the lid on. Sticking with the 7” 3/5 power for now, when I first turned it on I had it at 4/5 6.5” away… think I was blasting my coral with 180+! If long term the 7” distance doesn’t seem high enough I can lower a half inch at a time to get a small boost. I actually struggled getting a gradient with 100-120 at top and 50-60 on bottom which is what I wanted. Level 2 was basically the same ratios but even lower all around.
Tank is 14 in tall with a 1” sand bed and water line 1” below the top. Light distance was measured from water surface to the bottom of the hood flare
This light could easily grow SPS at level 5!
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