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Up to the beginning of last year I was using 4 x 400W metal halides (usually 20k) plus two 140W actinic plus two ordinary 58W daylight tubes. This was over a 1500+ litre tank I had in a downstairs spare room.
I decided to move to a smaller tank upstairs, closer to the daily living space, so downsized to a 500 L which I equipped with 7 x TMC Aquabeam tiles (5 x 2000 and 2 x 1500). They are not available in NZ so I had to import them from the UK.
Prior to this I spent a month or so researching, including on here where those lights (or perhaps just their US distributor) aren’t very popular. Other possibilities I was looking at were Radion and Zetlight, both of which I could get quite readily. Cost ended similar to Radion option.
The light colour proved very close to the previous light combination, as I had hoped, and overall I am pretty happy. I can grow SPS down near the bottom of the tank (about same depth as previous tank) and some corals are slightly less colourful and some are more colourful but most are just the same so I am pleased to have retained the reef looking pretty natural as far as I can tell. Because I have a number of them I get almost no disco ball effect and not much shadowing. I can’t really attribute all the growth to the light since I have also improved tank chemistry with the addition of controller and doser in place of a somewhat flaky calcium reactor.
Steve
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