URI VHO's questions plz help.

[gooyferret]

Is URI VHO's a good brand of bulb for a vho fixture? Granted i assume that corallife is better considering its more expensive. What does the coloartion of URI's look compared to Corallife does anyone know?

Thanks

 

[Hara]

Uri has built in reflectors, they last longer as well....that has been my experience.
The color is nice on them too.

 

[reefrunner69]

Coralife sucks, but that is just my opinion. URI is the best floresceant bulb made, wish they made PC and MH bulbs!!!

 

[loganj]

Yeah...what he said! The best color for a reef tank, IMO is an even mix of actinic and white actinic in the URI bulbs. They look really good.

 

[wseaton]

In PC, Coralife builds among the best actinic bulbs I've tried. Among the few that don't look like somebody simply took a blue magic marker and colored the tubes.

Not sure about VHO, but they aren't taking a 20% efficiency hit either for the same out-put

 

[reefrunner69]

Actually...coralife doesn't build or make anything. They simply put their name on something someone else made. If your seeing that, then the only "true" actinic PC you've seen is one with coralifes name on it, the blue marker bulbs are not actinic and are marketed as 7100K. There are actually very few PC bulb manufacturers, there are just plenty of people marketing them

Not sure about VHO, but they aren't taking a 20% efficiency hit either for the same out-put

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this statement.

 

[Bang Guy]

I agree that URI is far superior to Coralife.

 

[loganj]

I remember now reading something to the effect that the internal reflector radiated some of the light energy back into the bulb. Also that you'd get a little less coverage due to the small size of the reflector. I would seem to me though that a bulb without an internal reflector would suffer the same problem with light being reflected back into the bulb. Some of the parabolic reflectors might mitigate this to an extent...I'm not sure. And, in most systems, the bulbs are packed in pretty tight so the narrower light spread would work to your advantage. JMHO anyway. I wouldn't buy any other brand of VHO bulb.

 

[mkpaulson]

i just made the changeover from coralife to uri and I think I will continue buying uri vho , I like the color a lot better

 

[Guest]

I like URI bulbs also, and have used Coralife... I have Coralife 03 Actinics now for my 96 w PC...I love the color..

Anyway, I got curious and decided to email the folks at Coralife and guess what I received:

To whom it may concern:

I was just informed that you don't actually make the PC bulbs that you market, and this raises a question...
If this is true, why are the colors of the bulbs so much different than your competitors?

Tim

Tim,

That is not completely true. There is no company in the US that makes there
own bulbs directly. We use our own phosphors for all our lamps so that we
can control the colors. As for the colors being different. We use a
phosphor that peaks in the 420nm range not the 460nm range. We did this
because true Actinic lamps are in the 420nm range. The chlorophyll A
absorption spectrum peaks at the 420nm range and this is the most common
pigment found in zooxanthellae. With all this the lamps do not appear to be
as bright due to the lower 420nm range, but they are giving off the same
amount of energy, we just can not see it.

Hope this helps.

Dave Troop II
Energy Savers Unlimited, Inc.

I just thought I would share this bit of info

 

[reefrunner69]

LOL, ask them if they manufacture the phosphors....

 

[Guest]

I would imagine that all of the manufacturers have labs and they produce their own formulas... I worked for a company once that manufactured many different bottles of fuel additives... The companies that create the formulas send them to this company and they reproduce it and bottle it for them... at the time, there were over 50 brands... I know you have seen some of them...NOS, Discount Auto Parts, etc... All out of the same place... different companies and 1 source for bottling hence many different formulas for the phosphor coatings and 1 general place that creates the bulbs...

This is the way it works... much cheaper these days...