sand

I would suggest you put a couple pieces of encrusted rubble in the DT temporarily with a few hermits, and skip the snails for now. Hermits will scratch and scrape at the coralline, helping to spread it around. They will also readily accept supplemental feedings of any type of fish food, raw meaty seafoods, etc., etc. Snails will mostly just starve to death without adequate film or filamentous algae growth.

Concerning your light, no. Coralline grows at a wide variety of light intensities once it gets started. You might experience some bleaching and die-off when you upgrade your lighting, but it should recover fairly quickly.

 

I have read that actinic lighting is the best to promote coralline growth,it may be worth a few bucks for a actinic bulb if you would like to speed things up.It probably wouldn't need to be an exspensive name brand.When you do have a good amount of corailline growing it might be good to start checking your levels of Mg,Ca,and ALK,as corajlline will use some of these.

 

is there anyone that still makes T12 actinics? my old fixture is a 48'' two T12 lol as far as adding some of my fuge rubble rock to my Dt is a few weeks after getting them they bloomed some crazy sick algae...its better now but im a little gun shy! Ca has been staying around 480 and ALK is 179