PAR is not always the be all and end all, there are other factors to consider too. Had LED chips that pushed out 2000 par at the surface, which is pretty much midday sun, and my softies melted away, plus my red fish turned black. Plus if PAR is your only consideration, you can just run grow lights, which are red lights and a little blue, as that should give you the most PAR per watt, but it is going to look horrible on a display. A nice tool I have found when designing DIY LED lighting, is this website below. You put in the chip quantities you intend to use and it draws you a spectral diagram and give you a score out of 100 considering a few components like par and fluorescence:
SPECTRA can perform the optical simulation of many required for coral breeding. SPECTRAはサンゴ飼育に必要な多くの光学シミュレーションを行う事が可能です。
spectra.1023world.net
Great simulator, thanks for sharing. Will try it out with different scenarios for interest sake if nothing else. Nice tech for sure.
I can only speak for myself here but my view on PAR is that it is a starting point. A necessary one at that. OP discarded this delay in his quick-fix search, citing the guy in PE as being "unwilling" to help.
I'm glad he is now being helped by Royden, who knows his stuff - his work speaks for itself both in attention to detail and aesthetics (this is how you spell it btw).
Royden is not giving him a quick fix. As stated a lot of work goes into this process. The acclimation will take time too but now because other phrasiology has been used and direct request for PAR omitted, all is fine.
What bothers me to be honest is the outright rejection of PAR as another of the factors to be considered, the personal and unprovoked attack on said "PE guy" and of course the assumption that he rips off fellow hobbyists. In my humble opinion making a living is still legal and as such the average LFS charges a markup on what they sell too. Very often selling faulty products that are substandard and fail for whatever reason.
If you have the expertise to help out a fellow hobbyist and choose to do so at zero financial gain, that is your right. It doesn't make you an authority on anything and certainly doesn't make a business owner, with a different opinion to yours, wrong for asking for standard information. Asking all the rest of the details like what controllers and what existing LED is just another way to extrapolate a theoretical PAR. So here we are anyway back at the original question.
My 2c is that the aquarium community, fresh and marine, needs to start demonstrating the tranquility we claim our tanks give us and stop snarking each other whenever the opportunities arise. If you have other income streams and help out in the hobby "just for the love of it" it does not give you the right to slate vendors in the hobby who make a living from it. Just my opinion.
Personally im looking forward to see how this project turns out.