Do hard corals need mh lighting or are t5's enough? I currently have a t5 and t8 bulbs on my tank but only have softies and would like to progrees to the hard corals in time. t5 bulb only runs along half the length of the tank so would look into getting an overtank luminaire.
We recently switched to T5 HO with IceCap SLR individual reflectors and they are great. They're on our 90g, which is not intentionally a SPS tank, but we've been buying and holding some acropora and montipora SPS corals in that tank until our strictly SPS 40g breeder tank is up and running / ready for corals. Even with only 5 T5 HO bulbs on the 90g, there has been no color loss / browning out of the SPS corals added since the time of the change. In fact, a couple of the SPS corals that were starting to lose their color under our previous lighting (PCs) have almost completely regained their color under the T5 HO bulbs in only a couple of weeks.
We do have a friend that keeps only SPS in a 120g tank with T5 HO lighting. He gets really good growth and coloration.
I don't know the dimensions of a 46g, but if the length or front to back width does not really favor T5 HO (bulbs come in 24", 36", 48", etc. lengths; distance between bulbs with individual reflectors is about 2.5"), a 250w MH with a good reflector would make more sense and most likely provide better coverage if you're heading towards keeping SPS corals. FWIW, our 40g breeder (36" x 18" x 18") will be lit by a MH. A single MH won't provide good coverage over a 3' length, but there will be a couple supplemental 3' T5 HO bulbs and I'm planning on keeping lower light corals or even sun coral on the ends of the tank where the MH doesn't really reach.
Agreed, you can get good growth from either MHs or the T5s with quality reflectors. FSN's point about the tank dimensions is an important consideration for your set-up.
I agree. For more oddly shaped tanks, it would be of greater benefit (and cheaper, in such a case) to go with a single halide. I love my T5s, however, there are certain applications where it makes better sense to use halides (one, admittedly, is the reef central TOTM. It is indeed a very nice tank, but a little overkill on the T5s, IMHO).
Yeah, but that many T5s!? Why replace 16 bulbs, I think it was, when you could potentially only have to replace 4 (if I remember their tank dimensions correctly).
Ok so I've now bought an arcadia t5 luminaire that holds 4 bulbs, currently 3 white and 2 blue but some will need replacing as they are 11 months old. Am I better off sticking with the same combo of bulbs? can I use actinics in it? Bearing in mind I'd like to keep a few sps what would be best? Couldn't quite stretch to halides just yet as I've just upgraded my skimmer too
