DLI (Daily Light Interval) and Why PAR Isn't Accurate (1 Viewer)

[Cody]

Do you have some feeling for where the limits are? It would be interesting to see what you could get away with on the lower end of par just by running cheap lights for a 14 hour day or something like that. Cooking a lasagna for 14 hours at 70 degrees or for 5 minutes at 1000 degrees will product very different, equally terrible lasagnas

Just shooting from the hip, but translating what I have measured in the past, about 10 DLI seems about right for sticks. I went back and looked at previous tanks that were successful and they all tend to be roughly in that area.

 

[Cody]

Using WWC's recommendation of 150-250 par for LPS, and 250-350 par for SPS, and assuming an 8 hour per day schedule with no ramp, that leaves us with these target DLI numbers:

LPS: 4.3-7.2
SPS: 7.2-10.1

My AquaSD rainbow milli was getting about 350 par for about 8 hours, or 10.1 DLI. Here’s what it looked like.


Flash forward to recently and it was getting roughly 24 DLI (I’ve since reduce to about 14, with more cutbacks to come)



Keep in mind, the flow for both is/was heavy and pulsing, and the nitrates for both is about 5ppm with roughly .02-04 ppm phosphates. Basically saying, same nutrients, same flow.

 

[Stickboy97]

The calculator would be used for each location of par that you measured. For instance, if you took the measurements for 16 locations in your tank where corals are, the calculator would be used 16 times.

Gotcha....