Radium metal halide bulbs will not be produced anymore!

[jda]

Please use the NM and don't say infrared. My guess is that you saw the UH Manoa reference which is the first result to always pop up in Google? Their 10cm reference is for 1000 nm, or more, which is only heat based IR and they even say almost all. Red at 700nm at the equator can go up to 20m and the range from 350-850nm that I like to use goes at least 10m where nearly every coral that we have in the hobby is collected on one breath and most are in waist deep low tide areas. It isn't like 701nm just shuts down to 10 cm when 700 penetrates about 10m. Somewhere between 20m for 700nm and 10cm for 1000nm light drops off, or so.

You can bet that any 850nm from a mercury based bulb, or even the LED panels that IR diodes will get the 20-24 inches of most tanks. This light is getting to most coral.

I don't care about anything above 850nm... and probably nobody should.

I am not saying that IR is likely some kind of savior of all reef tanks. It likely is not. However, saying that it is nothing is just as foolish, IMO.

Everybody - ReefBuilder artciles are to drive clicks and are really paid advertising. They have been known in the past to bash products who won't pay them and stuff. They will shill for people who do pay them. Other than looking at photos, I would not use or trust anything that the print as facts or anything close to it. I only really like the photos of new corals and aberrant fish that people send them. Occasionally, a contributor writes a good article, but this is not all that often, IMO.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Please use the NM and don't say infrared. My guess is that you saw the UH Manoa reference

Going from memory and I think it came from a Dana Riddle or somebody else's dive measurements.

I don't care about anything above 850nm... and probably nobody should.

I am not saying that IR is likely some kind of savior of all reef tanks. It likely is not. However, saying that it is nothing is just as foolish, IMO.

Until somebody finds something in coral that uses those wavelengths, I would not call it "something" either. I think that is just as foolish. We know that the Chlorophyll F is not "it". Is there something else? I guess time and scientific study will tell.

Everybody - ReefBuilder artciles are to drive clicks and are really paid advertising. They have been known in the past to bash products who won't pay them and stuff.

I never understood the drooling over Jake's "content" for that very reason. Ryan built the entire concept around shilling, rumor and playing favorites. If you remember in 2009 when RC got hacked and hat the outage, it was Ryan and his platform who started spreading the rumor that hey were never coming back... Anyway.

 

[jda]

Dana worked some with UHM, IIRC. That 10cm in their generic light article was from the poles where they studied water heating, but light at the poles reflects more than it absorbs. It is different at the equator, but the whole thing works fine for a generic article which mostly only focuses on visible light anyway.

Far red has been shown to regulate zoox in high light situations... both as a stop-light and also to process more energy like Emerson described with plants. When you break the stupid term "far red" down, they meant up to about 850nm. This aligns with what nearly every hobbyist has seen where light devoid of anything much above 680nm will ruin corals at even medium intensity. This is enough for me. Both some science and some practical application. I am waiting for somebody else to explain how corals respond well to such high output of MH but not LED - any other theories or explanations? I would love to hear any of them since I love to read this stuff. Every time that I ask, the best answer that I get is "corals max out at lower levels anyway" which is like a toddler answer that avoids the question. Add in the a third thing that studies underway show that Emerson is real and I am now convinced. Not everybody has to be, but the wavelengths do get to the corals where it is present.

Those of us in Denver have an interesting relationship with ReefBuilders for one reason or another. Maybe being too close...

 

[Troylee]

Dana worked some with UHM, IIRC. That 10cm in their generic light article was from the poles where they studied water heating, but light at the poles reflects more than it absorbs. It is different at the equator, but the whole thing works fine for a generic article which mostly only focuses on visible light anyway.

Far red has been shown to regulate zoox in high light situations... both as a stop-light and also to process more energy like Emerson described with plants. When you break the stupid term "far red" down, they meant up to about 850nm. This aligns with what nearly every hobbyist has seen where light devoid of anything much above 680nm will ruin corals at even medium intensity. This is enough for me. Both some science and some practical application. I am waiting for somebody else to explain how corals respond well to such high output of MH but not LED - any other theories or explanations? I would love to hear any of them since I love to read this stuff. Every time that I ask, the best answer that I get is "corals max out at lower levels anyway" which is like a toddler answer that avoids the question. Add in the a third thing that studies underway show that Emerson is real and I am now convinced. Not everybody has to be, but the wavelengths do get to the corals where it is present.

Those of us in Denver have an interesting relationship with ReefBuilders for one reason or another. Maybe being too close...

I’m still awaiting that answer myself… these new reefers see my tank if we’re trading frags and what not and there like wow! Your tank is so bright! I’d place these lower in your tank so they don’t fry… I’m over 1000w with halides and some xho bars and I can take any frag or torch and blast it from a led tank under halides in 500+ par with zero acclimation and they do nothing but color up more and grow like crazy! There’s no acclimation required in my experience and never was back in the day besides start in the sand and move them up.. I’ve seen plenty of sticks toasted in these leds tanks and they’re not even cranked up all the way. It’s a weird deal all around without a doubt..

 

[Thales]

I am mostly into acropora and clams - some old school Z&P. I like to keep some of the old-school stuff that was in the hobby when I really got going circa 2000 - Atlantis stuff, Tyree LEs, stuff from Tina at Wet Thumbs, etc. A good number of these corals just simply do not grow well in LED systems - not impossible, but much harder. Who knows of a thriving Purple Monster colony under LEDs - there might be one or two, but I doubt any more than that and everybody that I know with a colony that is able to frag has metal halides. This was never a super easy coral, but it was keepable under mercury-based lights for anybody with a decent ability. True ORA Pearlberry is another one (this is though since there are so many fakes and people just don't want to believe that theirs is a fake) - it is keepable under LED, but not nearly as easily as under MH. Who has seen the OG PPE paly/zoa lately in a blue light LED tank? ...a few maybe, but not many. Some of the Atlantis corals are lost on this generation and a simple coral like Crayola Plana also is much harder under LEDs. Anybody seen a real nice Ice Fire type of Echinata under LED? Wild or with lineage? My general thought is that the lights are "fine" but at the first sign of an event, the corals cannot recover... just a guess since the few who have had some success with these under LED have explained that they never have alk swings, power outages, heater failures, etc. The dots to not connect here.

If people don't want to keep these corals, then fine. I get it. I do want to keep them. The folks that I trade acropora with want to keep them. There is some zen in knowing what you want to keep and then not working/spending any harder/more than you need to - genious, IMO. However, I hate the arguments that they "all grow coral" or "all light types are fine." What if I want to be better than fine? I want to grow any coral at any time. I also have larger tanks, welcome the heat (6x 300w heaters is 75-80% of my tank costs) and like the Phoenix 14k or Radium 20k look anyway - $12k in Radions to use the same wattage and try for the same look seems stupid to me.

I guess that in the end, the hobbyists who do tend to grow all/most corals well often use metal halides at least in some capacity. Maybe they are just better hobbyists. This could be true - you have success at higher po4 levels than nearly anybody else that I have ever seen and it is probably because you are just better than others. If they are just better hobbyists, then I am still happy to use what they use. I want to have a tank like Coppolino or the Weast tank, not like one of the Red Sea Max tanks set up by a store on the EcoTech payroll.

I think that reef tanks are cool... reefers are annoying... and I hear myself as I type this.

I totally hear you one the big picture stuff - people should run their tanks the way they want to to get results they like. There are many reasons to choose MH or LED or both.
The critical thinker in my feels compelled to point out that remembering the good old days is often filled with mis remembering and conclusions that may or may not reflect what the old days were actually like.
What I would really like is a decent survey of folks that keep corals so we know if our intuitions about what 'successful' people do are really on track, or if we are making mental data collecting mistakes. That kind of data is really hard to get because of the siloing of reefkeeping, and because success means different things to different people. The N needs to be big, and the data collection needs to be robust.
I had problems with the some of the old school fancy corals when I ran MH and when I kept my PO4 down, and IIRC so did a bunch of people - I never could get purple monster to take. But I did lots of things differently then, so did we all, so I have a hard time saying MH made things better. I remember a tank I had in like 2000, that ran on MH, Vita Twists, and B Ionic. When I went to a larger tank, I stopped the B ionic, and for a while I felt like that old tank was so much better, it must have been the B ionic. Now I think I was just excited by that old tank and my memory adds that excitement to the mix and makes the memory seem like it was better than it was, and that my tanks since have been just fine - some corals do great sometimes, some do less great other times, so it is hard for me to get on board with the idea that one element of our reef stew is uber critical. Acclimation to different lighting may take longer than we want to think it does (and may be part of the issue with outplanting), which is actually one of the reasons that helped me go to LED - more stores, people, and farms went to LED and I wanted to make acclimation to my home tank easier.
FWIW I don't run my led's blue all the time every day, I never have, even in the vita twist days. Heck, I had some custom lumenarc fixtures that held two bulbs so I could run lower kelvin sometimes and higher kelvin others. I go with the try to give them everything they may need and keep it stable.
I am starting to care about 'fancy pants' corals again, so we will see how they do. Like I said, my pearlberry started growing about six months ago, so I am interested to see if I can track down what helped that happen.

I am with you about the kind of tank I want, and think the scale likely has something to do with the success.

I hear myself as I type as well!!!

 

[oreo54]

This aligns with what nearly every hobbyist has seen where light devoid of anything much above 680nm will ruin corals at even medium intensity.

Well this would include most reef centric t5's especially the most favored ones like blue plus and true actinic.
Edit for reference:

And a paper.

Global distribution of a chlorophyll f cyanobacterial marker - The ISME Journal

Some cyanobacteria use light outside the visible spectrum for oxygenic photosynthesis. The far-red light (FRL) region is made accessible through a complex acclimation process that involves the formation of new phycobilisomes and photosystems containing chlorophyll f. Diverse cyanobacteria...

www.nature.com

 

[jda]

I totally hear you one the big picture stuff - people should run their tanks the way they want to to get results they like. There are many reasons to choose MH or LED or both.
The critical thinker in my feels compelled to point out that remembering the good old days is often filled with mis remembering and conclusions that may or may not reflect what the old days were actually like.
What I would really like is a decent survey of folks that keep corals so we know if our intuitions about what 'successful' people do are really on track, or if we are making mental data collecting mistakes. That kind of data is really hard to get because of the siloing of reefkeeping, and because success means different things to different people. The N needs to be big, and the data collection needs to be robust.
I had problems with the some of the old school fancy corals when I ran MH and when I kept my PO4 down, and IIRC so did a bunch of people - I never could get purple monster to take. But I did lots of things differently then, so did we all, so I have a hard time saying MH made things better. I remember a tank I had in like 2000, that ran on MH, Vita Twists, and B Ionic. When I went to a larger tank, I stopped the B ionic, and for a while I felt like that old tank was so much better, it must have been the B ionic. Now I think I was just excited by that old tank and my memory adds that excitement to the mix and makes the memory seem like it was better than it was, and that my tanks since have been just fine - some corals do great sometimes, some do less great other times, so it is hard for me to get on board with the idea that one element of our reef stew is uber critical. Acclimation to different lighting may take longer than we want to think it does (and may be part of the issue with outplanting), which is actually one of the reasons that helped me go to LED - more stores, people, and farms went to LED and I wanted to make acclimation to my home tank easier.
FWIW I don't run my led's blue all the time every day, I never have, even in the vita twist days. Heck, I had some custom lumenarc fixtures that held two bulbs so I could run lower kelvin sometimes and higher kelvin others. I go with the try to give them everything they may need and keep it stable.
I am starting to care about 'fancy pants' corals again, so we will see how they do. Like I said, my pearlberry started growing about six months ago, so I am interested to see if I can track down what helped that happen.

I am with you about the kind of tank I want, and think the scale likely has something to do with the success.

I hear myself as I type as well!!!

The thing about the good old days is that not everybody has to misremember. Many are still doing these things right now. Some left and came back. The best tanks (for me) that I have seen are mostly tanks run the same way that they were 20 years ago.

Truly, what has the hobby given us in terms of equipment, supplies and methodology that we did not know, or is truly better, since 2000? Freshwater Mysis and Hannah Ultra Low Phosphorous Checker is all that I can think of. When did New Life Spectrum food come out? I could add that to the list. A good friend of mine added interesting Clownfish to the list, but the Soloman Island True Percs will always be the best in my mind and most hobbyists nowadays will unfortunately never see one. I will add captive bred fish and urchins to the list.

Making a list is hard because the people giving you the data are probably not worthy. Just in my example of Pearlberry, there are just too few who know what the actual ORA one looks like and you just make enemies when you tell folks otherwise even though it is true. You just have to look at trends - when you only see an Ice Fire Type Echinata come from somebody with a Metal Halide or T5s, then that says something to me.

Edit: I think that a good start would be for a large population of the hobby to reject thinking and terms/phrases using "corals" as a generic term. This would also have to happen with subset of corals. "SPS" is perhaps the worst and includes many species that we used to grow in fuges under screw-in CFL lighting with our chaeto... all the way to super specialized acropora that really only grow well under sunlight or super high PAR MH (like Palmata). However, it took people 6-7 years to believe me that Vibrant was not bacteria, so I am not likely the person to start this movement.

 

[njreefkeeper]

The thing about the good old days is that not everybody has to misremember. Many are still doing these things right now. Some left and came back. The best tanks (for me) that I have seen are mostly tanks run the same way that they were 20 years ago.

Truly, what has the hobby given us in terms of equipment, supplies and methodology that we did not know, or is truly better, since 2000? Freshwater Mysis and Hannah Ultra Low Phosphorous Checker is all that I can think of. When did New Life Spectrum food come out? I could add that to the list. A good friend of mine added interesting Clownfish to the list, but the Soloman Island True Percs will always be the best in my mind and most hobbyists nowadays will unfortunately never see one. I will add captive bred fish and urchins to the list.

Making a list is hard because the people giving you the data are probably not worthy. Just in my example of Pearlberry, there are just too few who know what the actual ORA one looks like and you just make enemies when you tell folks otherwise even though it is true. You just have to look at trends - when you only see an Ice Fire Type Echinata come from somebody with a Metal Halide or T5s, then that says something to me.

Edit: I think that a good start would be for a large population of the hobby to reject thinking and terms/phrases using "corals" as a generic term. This would also have to happen with subset of corals. "SPS" is perhaps the worst and includes many species that we used to grow in fuges under screw-in CFL lighting with our chaeto... all the way to super specialized acropora that really only grow well under sunlight or super high PAR MH (like Palmata). However, it took people 6-7 years to believe me that Vibrant was not bacteria, so I am not likely the person to start this movement.

I guess now we have ICP testing so we can chase unicorns when all else is doing well.

Seriously though, there’s definitely something to the Pearlberry, Ice Fire Echinata and a few others thriving rather than surviving when they’re in halide tanks. Basically anything with a pearlescent, mother of pearl glow seems to do better under halides. Aside from those, the rich, solid colored shallow water acropora (Oregon Blue Tort, Purple Monster) seem to want halides as well. It’s pretty much all the ones that don’t fluoresce in carnival fun house lighting that want that white light.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the LED’s. I think it’s that even at 100% intensity on every channel, almost every fixture is still more blue than an average 20k halide. And I know people loooooooove the blue plus t5 bulb, but it isn’t until I throw some white coral plus bulbs in the mix that I’ll get better coloration.

 

[djf91]

I guess now we have ICP testing so we can chase unicorns when all else is doing well.

Seriously though, there’s definitely something to the Pearlberry, Ice Fire Echinata and a few others thriving rather than surviving when they’re in halide tanks. Basically anything with a pearlescent, mother of pearl glow seems to do better under halides. Aside from those, the rich, solid colored shallow water acropora (Oregon Blue Tort, Purple Monster) seem to want halides as well. It’s pretty much all the ones that don’t fluoresce in carnival fun house lighting that want that white light.

Hahaha and carnival fun house names.

 

[oreo54]

Historical question ..

Back in Bali!

Hello everyone! A miracle has happened and I am back in Bali working on a special project. I am truly lucky to be able to continue my p...

eddie-coral-adventures.blogspot.com

Why was it called a "deep water" coral here?

This is one of my favorite deep water acroporas from the Northern Bali area. This is probably a granulosa or a lokani. It is the "purple monster" species made famous by Steve Tyree..... .......The deep water corals are collected in 10 to 15 meters. But the thing to consider is that the water is not clear, more murky so less sun penetrates the corals.

 

[jda]

I have never heard a good explanation for how the term deepwater came about. Most use smooth skinned acropora as a substitute - less polyps. Smooth skin acros grow out of the water in low tide sometimes - lokani, granulosa, etc. They are collected right next to other acropora in shallow water.

Eddie Purple Monster is not the real Purple Monster. It is not that close other than being purple and a smooth skin. Different coral. It is cool. UC and ReefBuilders found a wild colony that might be the same coral in the Solomans where the OG PM was collected - 5 to 15 feet deep on sandy bottom - they took specimens from 15 feet. Hardly deepwater. There is a ReefBuilders article on it, ironically. The pictures are pretty cool. They collected it in masks, like I have always said... there is not much deeper than this that is collected for this hobby. I had both and they were very similar - the UC one died on me, though. I don't know anybody who has it anymore... either personally or through the grape vine.

Deepwater is another dumb term that stuck.

 

[djf91]

I have never heard a good explanation for how the term deepwater came about. Most use smooth skinned acropora as a substitute - less polyps. Smooth skin acros grow out of the water in low tide sometimes - lokani, granulosa, etc. They are collected right next to other acropora in shallow water.

Eddie Purple Monster is not the real Purple Monster. It is not that close other than being purple and a smooth skin. Different coral. It is cool. UC and ReefBuilders found a wild colony that might be the same coral in the Solomans where the OG PM was collected - 5 to 15 feet deep on sandy bottom - they took specimens from 15 feet. Hardly deepwater. There is a ReefBuilders article on it, ironically. The pictures are pretty cool. They collected it in masks, like I have always said... there is not much deeper than this that is collected for this hobby. I had both and they were very similar - the UC one died on me, though. I don't know anybody who has it anymore... either personally or through the grape vine.

Deepwater is another dumb term that stuck.

Dustin’s deepwater was one of my favorite. But that might have actually been a true deepwater.

 

[njreefkeeper]

Historical question ..

Back in Bali!

Hello everyone! A miracle has happened and I am back in Bali working on a special project. I am truly lucky to be able to continue my p...

eddie-coral-adventures.blogspot.com

Why was it called a "deep water" coral here?

If I recall, anything smooth skinned fell into the category of deep water.

 

[BeanAnimal]

You have to remember, that is before the exotic name days, but that is where it began. Calling something "deepwater" made it sound rare, expensive and hard to get, even if it came from wading pools and was collected by the cratefull. Jason F and Steve T are responsible for the name game nonsesene....

 

[nereefpat]

Anybody need this bad boy?

2 x 250 watts. M138.
Weighs about 30 pounds

 

[A. grandis]

Not sure how many of those Aqua Bright Solutions they had in stock, but their 400W 14K lamps are already sold out!?
Demand could really be that high, as they said!!!

 

[oreo54]

Not sure how many of those Aqua Bright Solutions they had in stock, but their 400W 14K lamps are already sold out!?
Demand could really be that high, as they said!!!

Bill of lading stated "64 pieces Metal Halide lamps".
There are 20 "models"on their website.
Draw whatever conclusion you like.

 

[Reefering1]

That reminds me, wernt we waiting for someone to open their hps ballast to share the ansi number...(?)

 

[oreo54]

Yeah, I got it. I forgot you did that search.

In all honesty I didn't do that search.
Someone at RC did. Fruit of my seed though.

 

[Minifoot77]

That reminds me, wernt we waiting for someone to open their hps ballast to share the ansi number...(?)