Lighting advice needed!

[Daniel Doherty]

Hey guys, I’m new to reef keeping after keeping planted tanks for years and don’t really understand the whole light parameters needed. I’ve always been tight on money while fish-keeping, as I’m still a student, but figured out that all I needed for planted tank was a light with the colour spectrum of 6500-7000k. I found a floodlight on Amazon with that colour spectrum for 15 euro and it grew plants brilliantly for 5 years.
Obviously corals are a lot more expensive then plants so I did not want to risk such DIY jobs with such a substantial loss at risk, and so I picked up a 2nd hand ai hydra 26hd for a great price. It’s great. Here comes my dilemma.
I upgraded my 25 gallon cube tank to a larger 60cm cube 55gallon tank that I sourced on donedeal, but the tank has a canopy, leaving the light only 3 inches above the water level. This means the light distribution has a lot of hot spots and bad spread. I fastened the light using chicken wire as the arm that came with it wouldn’t fit under the canopy.
I’m wondering do ye have any ideas what I should do? I heard on BRS YouTube channel that for optimal spread of light on a tank this size, the ai hydra should be 14 inches above the water. I could build a taller canopy, but it would be a small bit of an eye sore in the room. I’m wondering do any of ye also know of LED light bars that work for reefing?
Any sort of feedback at all would be great!

 

[Doctorgori]

you will get a lot of great answers.
basically one could loosely rank lights in unofficial price:quality tiers with no clear cut quality over value trend
again loosely any/all lights named “reef”
should theoretically work anymore (more or less)

Anyway
here are my tiers (no arguments from me if anyone adds or chimes in)

1. Radion/Kessil/Phillips/Sky.
2. AI (Prime/Hydra), Noopsyche, et
3. Chinese knockoffs (Jebao, et)
4. Hypergrows et (or whatever the name)

Welcome anyone to clean that list up

And BTW you can grow corals with any light over 5500K , all depends on energy levels in certain spectrums…
I can attest to this fact with experience

 

[Doctorgori]

Deleted/duplicate

Added: I’d bet one AI Hydra would do ya but again they got a few new light entries, so here is a bump
for better input

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Do you have a lid on the tank, in between the light and the water? I mean, the light being only 3" off the water, it seems dangerous to me.

 

[Daniel Doherty]

Do you have a lid on the tank, in between the light and the water? I mean, the light being only 3" off the water, it seems dangerous to me.

Yes! You can kind of see it in one the photos. It’s got a glass sliding lid.

 

[Daniel Doherty]

Deleted/duplicate

Added: I’d bet one AI Hydra would do ya but again they got a few new light entries, so here is a bump
for better input

Thanks for all the info. I think I’ll just build a new taller canopy for better distribution from it.