A reef in sunlight.

[Timfish]

Those of you who have looked at my DIY thread are familiar with this setup.  Since it also gets 1-2 hours of sunlight in the mornings I thought I'd post this in the general Reef section.  The biggest concern I've run into is  light intensity and spectrum.  The PAR under sunlight is ~450 PAR  and the LED are putting ~500 PAR at the surface.   With both PAR is over 900!!!!   No coral I know of locally grown can tolerate that!   The spectrum has been a challenge also as sunlight is heavy on the red spectrum, for those who remember Dana Riddle's presentation a couple years ago at C4 too much red light is not good for corals.   First thing was to make sure the timers are set never to come on for at least an hour after the sun moves away from the tank.   One of the "interesting" challenges I've run into was even at lower light levels some corals still do not like sunlight so there's a lot of experimentation finding the right corals and location. (Because of internal reflection most locations get some degree of sunlight even though it is at lower PAR.)  Frogspawn, for instance, won't tolerate hardly any sunlight whereas a Torch coral frag, even though it deosn't expand much, seems to be happy getting 300+ PAR sunlight.   One of the pleasant surprises is purple Stylophora (thank you DaM!!) looks good under either sunlight or LED albeit colors are brighter under LED.    It's not surprising so far that  red corals generally do better with sunlight.

 

 

 

[victoly]

No shirt no shoes no service!

[Timfish]

Here's the shirt:

 

And here's the shoes:

 

 

[JamesL]

I love the aquascaping in this tank!

[mFrame]

In the video we can clearly see your bare feet in the reflection.    I assume the client doesn't let you wear your shoes inside ?

[Timfish]

@JamesL:

Thank you!  It was a challenge and fun figuring it out.  There was originally a small balcony that was going to extend out over the tank.  It would have been ideal for mounting the lights and for hiding the return lines.  However between ordering the tank and delivery the client decided to remove it and it was a bit of a surprise to see when I delivered the tank I was going to have to completely rethink the lighting and plumbing, and aquascaping!  Fortunately I had already planned on hiding the overflow in the rock work and was able to run the return lines up through it.   From my past DIY research I knew I could get pretty tight optics to light it up but I still had to experiment with the design to work out intensity and heat issues.   And aquascaping it would be a lot more complex and taking quite a bit longer than usual.   Instead of just thinking about how it would look from the front with  lighting immediately above I had to visualize how it would look from above, from the sides,  at angles from the sides,  how it would look with refraction  creating dual and triple images of corals,  and with reflection even the back sides could be seen so even though it's against a wall I was thinking 360 degree viewing as well as from above.  And with the lighting coming in from a relatively sharp angle the bottom would be lit up very differently with the back being the brightest and an unusually dim area all across the front.    

 

@mFrame:

Naw, I just don't like wearing shoes if I don't have to.