Will plant lighting work?

[flip_lx]

I'm fairly certain my 29 gallon is going to make the swap to SW this summer and i was wondering if my 2x65watt coarlife fixture would be good for making "things" grow on the live rock. I don't plan on buying any real corals or anthing like that but would enjoy the freebies attached to live rock if they showed.

The bulbs in it currently are 6700K bulbs natural light would i need to replace them with them with a 50/50 or the blue light (name escapes me right now)?

[Kurt_Nelson]

Yup... 130W will work just fine for your tank. You could probably do some soft corals with that, but it's definitely good enough to get the coraline algae going.

You'll probably want to swap out the bulbs for a 10,000k bulb and a actinic blue bulb. Seems like most folks run with 1/2 their lighting 10k, and the other 1/2 the actinic - Makes the colors crisper and brighter.

[flip_lx]

cool thanks for the info, now i just gotta get my 10 gallon cycled up and find cheap live rock

[melosu58]

Moved to General Hardware and equipment discussion. 50/50 and actinic would be nice also.

[flip_lx]

Ok slight bump is it "better" to do a 10k and actinic or a 50/50 and actinic? I hope to perhaps do some easy low light corals and what not was wondering which would be the better choice to promote coarline and coral/invert growth

does having a 50/50 make an impact on there being less "sunlight" and more bluelight or am i just worrying my self?

[Lance M.]

I'd like to second melosu's suggestion on the 50/50 and actinic. I read a post before with him suggesting and then made my own post about and he convinced me to try it out since he uses 50/50 and actinic on his tank and the corals look great.

I had 10,000k and actinic and it is almost six months so I needed new bulbs and the 50/50 actinic suggestion came up so I took out my 10,000k bulb and put in a 50/50. It definitely looks bluer/more purple but I noticed that all the coral's colors are much more vibrant since I made the change. The greens and reds of my mushrooms and bta are much more vibrant. I like the look of it a lot now that I've gotten use to it and I'll see how it does in the long term. melosu said he's had it like that for years and everything is doing great so I think it will be good.

[melosu58]

I`ve had it for 9+ yrs now and my corals have grown tremendously.I love the color it gives off but more importantly my corals love it more. I dont target feed any of my corals except the sun polyps and they feed off the light and water column. Check out my gallery and view my tank in my sig to see the color difference.

[flip_lx]

is there a big difference between actinic 03 (420nm) vs Actinic blue (460nm) ?

[Lance M.]

They are two different wavelengths in the blue part of the light spectrum. As far as I know the coralife actinic bulb has both. Coral uses both.