10 Gallon tank lights

[rocktrns]

I have a 10 gallon tank with
1 Betta
3 Zebra danio
1 long finned danio
4 Neon tetra
2 cory cats

Added today
2 oto catfish
4 Ghost shrimp


I have anacharis
Amazon sword
Baby tears-barely surviving
and another palnt
I had a normal indoor spiral light,but 2500K

today I brought a 13 Watt spiral bulb with 6500k will this make my plant nice and lush?

 

[chrisjg04]

They 6500k should do better for your plants. However if you really want them to thrive your probably better off getting a CFL light or T5HO light for the tank.

Adding more lighting will allow you to put a DIY cO2 system on the tank and your plant growth will really take off

 

[JohnPaul]

6500K is definitely the right spectrum, and will be much, much better for your plants than 2500K.

That being said, one 13W bulb over 10g of water is barely over 1 WPG. That would still be considered "low light." The anacharis should do fine, and the sword likely will do okay, but that's probably too little light for baby tears.

Does your hood fixture only have space for 1 bulb? If you could get a fixture that could hold two bulbs and thus get yourself up to 26W of light (or, if you buy 15W bulbs, 30W of light) the number of plants you could grow would increase a lot. Of course, once you get into the 2.5-3.0 WPG range you are probably going to have to start dosing some ferts. So it really depends whether you want to stick with a low-light, low-maintenance tank, or whether you want to increase the light but also increase the maintenance level of care that goes along with that.

 

[Fishguy2727]

I always used the incandescent fixtures with Coralife's 20 watt CFL bulbs. One on tank I had two of those fixtures for a total of 80 watts.

 

[rocktrns]

6500K is definitely the right spectrum, and will be much, much better for your plants than 2500K.

That being said, one 13W bulb over 10g of water is barely over 1 WPG. That would still be considered "low light." The anacharis should do fine, and the sword likely will do okay, but that's probably too little light for baby tears.

Does your hood fixture only have space for 1 bulb? If you could get a fixture that could hold two bulbs and thus get yourself up to 26W of light (or, if you buy 15W bulbs, 30W of light) the number of plants you could grow would increase a lot. Of course, once you get into the 2.5-3.0 WPG range you are probably going to have to start dosing some ferts. So it really depends whether you want to stick with a low-light, low-maintenance tank, or whether you want to increase the light but also increase the maintenance level of care that goes along with that.

no my tank has two bulbs not one