As promised (and delivered late...) here are some current pictures and an LED report. These pictures are all completely raw, unedited in any way, and to be honest, a little blurry. Not the greatest camera, and CERTAINLY not the greatest photographer. I will give you a FTS, and a few sample corals and their placements.
Pix first. Report at the bottom.
Hydnophora (Horn coral). In the FTS, Middle right column:
Green Poci. From the FTS, this is in the upper-middle center column:
Scroll coral and red plating monti. Center column, lower down:
Some birdsnests. Left column, near the top:
A Favites. Left column, all the way down by the sandbed:
OK, report time. I have had these CCLEDs for a few months now. They continue to work fine, fans running for heat blowoff, no burned LEDs, etc. The blues on the left side of the tank are slightly deeper blue than the right side of the tank, but I did get these two fixtures at different times....silly me.
The fixture on the left with the deeper blue seems to be more powerful than the fixture on the right. Both of these lights have a habit of bleaching coral if I introduce them too high....ESPECIALLY LPS corals!! I would dearly like to get some par readings or at least lumen readings in this tank, because I almost feel like there might be too much light. As you can see from the favites, even though it's on the sand bed, it still bleached out a little. I have moved it under a shaded rock and it has started to come back and color up again.
Take the red monti for another example. This coral actually went through quite a bleaching episode, as Siptang can attest. Although this is in the middle of the tank, it might have been too high up (or I should have at least started it lower). This coral didn't start to come back and re-color until I introduced the scroll coral directly above it, which shaded the Monti out nicely. I also have a small green monti frag that is at about the same level, but it's under the right side of the tank and it never went through any bleaching.
While the montis and LPS corals have gone through lighting acclimation stresses, the SPS birdsnests and Poci (and a cheap brown Monti Digi that's not pictured) have been growing very well under these lights. The Poci in particular has grown quite a lot since I got him, and the three birdsnest frags have new growth on their tips and have continued to color up.
The tank has gone through a few growing pains in these past few months. We've had an outbreak of an interesting algal film that has come and gone twice. It's similar to hair algae, but so pale as to be almost clear, and it created a semi-thick carpet over the rocks and powerheads near the TOP of the tank on the left side...that's right, in the absolute brightest section of the tank possible. This film was about 1/4 inch thick, definitely similar to filamentous HA but hard to remove manually, and clear to very, very light brown. At first I considered the possibility that it was some form of bacterial growth rather than algal, and after reading Sprung's algae book I suspected it might be a form of cyano. Whatever it was, it seems to have died back now. I am skimming a little more aggressively than I used to (emptying the cup every 2-3 days rather than every week) and I've been swapping out filter floss completely every week, whereas I used to only change the top layer of floss. Interestingly, I had a little actual obvious cyano over on the right side in a lower-flow corner that also died back the same time my mystery algae disappeared.
So far I am moderately happy with these two fixtures. I'd like to see how I feel about them in 6 months, if they have held up, etc. My only source of irritation with them is actually more my problem than the fixture's: I really need to learn to add new corals very low in the tank, and only raise them slowly.
