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dross11450 · 07/21/2017, 05:54 PM

I appreciate the helpful responses. To one question, I'd love to move on to LPS and SPS corals, but I've dropped more money on the hobby in the last year (I do really enjoy it) than I expected to, and I have the idea that to support harder corals, I'm going to need to drop in the $1500 range to get adequate lighting.

I do have the general idea that for a given lighting level, T5's come in at the lowest cost, with Halide possibly next, and to get LED's that are actually powerful enough for SPS/LPS, you need a very expensive LED system. There's plenty of LED lights that "claim" to be reef oriented, like the one I have, but I've noticed from reviews that to really hit the levels you need in terms of total light output, proper wavelengths, and so on, requires almost $2K to really do it right in anything other than T5/flourescent technology.

Does this ring true with this expert community?

07/21/2017, 05:54 PM	#4
dross11450 Registered Member Join Date: Jul 2017 Posts: 8	Thanks for the feedback, and a clarification I appreciate the helpful responses. To one question, I'd love to move on to LPS and SPS corals, but I've dropped more money on the hobby in the last year (I do really enjoy it) than I expected to, and I have the idea that to support harder corals, I'm going to need to drop in the $1500 range to get adequate lighting. I do have the general idea that for a given lighting level, T5's come in at the lowest cost, with Halide possibly next, and to get LED's that are actually powerful enough for SPS/LPS, you need a very expensive LED system. There's plenty of LED lights that "claim" to be reef oriented, like the one I have, but I've noticed from reviews that to really hit the levels you need in terms of total light output, proper wavelengths, and so on, requires almost $2K to really do it right in anything other than T5/flourescent technology. Does this ring true with this expert community?