a difficult lighting question

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prisoner1572

Aquarium Advice Regular
Joined
Jun 13, 2003
Messages
77
Location
Illinois
How much light do I want in my aquarium. Not from metal halides but from either fluorescent or compact. not only in terms of watts but candela or lumens. how intense should the light be? and how much should be from white light and how much should be from blue actinic?
My tank is 125 and I know it should have about 500 watts of light.
I don't have a reef right now but I may want inverts in the future.

also for the moonlights, how intense hould that light be?

-Will
 
All I can really say with certainty is that the moonlights are very low output- I believe 1 Watt per light. I have the CSL PC Moonlight 48" unit and there are 4x1Watt Moonlights in there. They serve no real purpose other than allow you to more easily observe your critters at night. (They are very very cool though :) )

I think that those in the know will ask you for more details on what you plan to keep in the tank. As far as I know, VHO or PC are fine for most everything except SPS and perhaps some LPS unless your tank is very deep. I keep soft corals (mushrooms etc) under my 260Watt PCs in a 48" 55G tank and they appear to be doing very well. Hopefully more knowledgeable lighting folks will chime in....

Good luck,
Brendan.
 
Will,

You say you don't want a reef now, correct? Well if you aren't keeping any photosynthetic inverts, you will don't need any more light then what came with the tank. If you are wanting to get good coralline algae growth on your LR, then you basically need to get your lights over the 2-3 wpg mark. Doesn't really matter what you use here... FYI, using wpg actually sucks when trying to determine a lighting scheme. But it works well enough when talking about coralline growth on LR so that is why I used it. For anything else we need to talk about actually lights and how many are used.

I know that this may not be answering your question, but I have no idea what the ideal lumens is for coral. I can tell you what kind of light (i.e. PC, VHO, T5, MH, etc..)your corals would like though so if you have any in mind that you are wanting to keep, post them and we'll look at them.
 
well then nevermind about the lumen stuff, but i really need to understand the different lights and stuff, like what is the T5, and how many watts should be given to 100% white and 100% blue spectrum bulbs. is it just 2 parts blue and 2 parts white?
 
like what is the T5,

T5's are a VHO bulb. Normal fluorescent lighting that you see in buildings and those that come with fish tanks are call NO lights. VHO bulbs use only an electronic ballast and deliver more wattage than NO bulbs. T5's are extremely bright even rivaling small MH setups...

how many watts should be given to 100% white and 100% blue spectrum bulbs. is it just 2 parts blue and 2 parts white?

Basically, you have got it. If you are running four bulbs, I would dedicate two bulbs to 03 and two bulbs to a 6500K or 10000K.
 
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