acclimating new bulbs??

[jrthomas40]

just wondering how all you experienced reefers acclimate your tank inhabitants to new bulbs after replacement??? i changed mine almost 2 weeks ago and my tank just does not seem happy

 

[chilwil84]

depends how old the bulbs were. if you changed out mh that were over a year old you could do a pretty good job of light shocking your inhabitants and would need to shorten the time the lights were on by a couple hours and increase it something like 15 minutes every few days till you get back to full time period your running

 

[jrthomas40]

the bulbs i changed out were about 10 months...i just reduced the photoperiod the other day down to 5 hours of halide from 8 and the vhos are on from 9-11 and 4-9

 

[jrthomas40]

bump for more opinions

 

[sly]

I spent over 2 weeks acclimating my tank. I reduced the photoperiod down to about 4 hours on, 20 hours off. I gave that a few days and whenever everything seemed to be doing ok with that, I added another hour. I slowly added hours and monitored everything as I went. Whenever I got to the point that I started to see a little more algae growth, I backed it down an hour and left it there.
I went from old PC bulbs to a six light set T5 system. They definitely needed acclimating...