So quick question Would you pay for Par Reading ??
- Thread starter civicdemon
- Start date
If you have the disposable income it's a great asset to have. But to be honest once you played with different lighting and by that I mean brands and bulbs etc... You know where to place things. PAR meters are excellent gauges but no necessary IMO. Buy a light that someone has a full thriving reef and you can bet if your other balances are correct you will have similar results. Having water parameters and flow is more important than lighting IMe. I've literally seen people have beautiful tanks with minimal PAR and the colors were just fine on their sticks and other coral.
Actually this is very true. Corals all have different lighting requirements, and all lighting sources have different PUR outputs regardless of the PAR they would hit on a meter. If you're picking up an MQ200, the sensor actually tapers off hard near both chlorophyll A peaks (these would give a rough approximate PUR for many of the corals we keep). I can get a radion, an incandescent flood light and a green laser pointer to hit the same PAR numbers in my tank, which grows corals best? There is a reason you will not find anyone touting hard PAR number requirements for corals, it is a meaningless number. If you want something to measure your lighting levels to acclimate corals or to find out if your bulbs are losing intensity, just pick up a cheap LUX meter on eBay/amazon.
Neptune, has a fake rock coming out that connects to the apex and sits in your tank and will give you a constant output of par readings. Pretty kool kinda been debated how useful it is but we like our toys!!https://www.neptunesystems.com/pmk/
