Day 11.5, Holy uMol's Batman!

So just a brief update today, mostly because something surprised me.

I decided after the previous light test, that I was worried the lens rings I printed were putting the light out at too narrow of a beam.  The easy remedy, would be to print one more, without the focusing ring, and see how it compared to the other light.  5 hours later, I had the new ring, and the light went up on the tank.

You can see how one of the lenses is fully showing, and the other has the little V ring around it.  Both are just opaque white PETG plastic.  Nothing fancy here.

So I got out my trust Apogee meter, and set the lights to 45% ( 83 Watts ).  Placed the probe right under the original one, with the focus ring, and got a quick reading of 497 or so.  Ok, cool.  Lets put it under the other one.  Will probably be around 300ish, wait, what?  179.  Seriously?  179?  Oh I must still have this light set at 15%, hrmm, nope, 45%.  Maybe this ballast is flaky, swap cables, nope, still 179.  Nope.  That's the difference of the ring.  Slightly less spread to the light, and a doubling of PAR.  And it's true more or less at all the different positions.  Just better PAR.  I suspect less is flying off into the walls and whatnot.  But it's totally crazy.  I thought the rings would just give me an extra 5% or something, but this is truly nuts.  You can even see it in the tank.

Focusing ring is on the left in this photo.  The difference is visually astounding.

So I pulled the new ring off, and went ahead and assembled the rest of the lights with the focus rings that I originally printed, hung them all up, and gave a quick 45% power test:

This was taken at night, so the solar tubes aren't helping at all here.  They are kind of positioned where the dark areas of the tank on the sides and middle are.  I might still need some smaller supplemental lights, or maybe a light bar across the rear, but we will see.

Quick readings around the tank (still at 45% here) give me about 200ish PAR on the rocks, 70 or so on the sandbed.  I can live with this for now.

Also did another quick nitrate and phosphate test this morning.  Still too high.  That Chaeto needs to get to work.  Or I need to get to work and get the third fuge online.

Dreaming of Christmas Wrasses and Peppermint Angels, off to bed I go!