Lighting and flow questions

[shortee611]

I'm in the process of setting up a 90 with overflow and a 40gal sump. It's my old reef setup.

I was going to use my icecap 660 balast and just 2 of my vho bulbs instead on 4, 1 white atinic and 1 blue atinic. Is this too much light? If so should i change to regular bulbs or change to regular bulbs and a regular balast.

Now i'm using a mag9 for the return from my sump going into a spray bar along the bottom back of the display tank. Is this too much flow? I have a mag7 should i change to it? or go lower still? There is about 5 feet of head travel to the top of main tank.

Thanks

[Sploke]

How much flow does a mag9 put out...about 1200gph or something like that? Depends on hat kind of filtration you're using and how your sump is set up, but if its a wet/dry, I would say its too much flow.

As far as light, it all depends. Are you planning on plants? And what exactly is a "white actinic"? Actinic means the blue spectrum...and this light is not very beneficial to plants (if you'll have any) but some fw people use them for the look. For plants, a combination of daylight (6500k) and actinic is a good split between a nice look and good light for the plants. If you won't have plants, lighting is completely up to you, just don't put so much that you create an algae farm. Two T5HOs will be...108w? This will be plenty to see your fish, and low enough to not cause algae problems. You could probably even grow some low-light plants if you wanted.

[OldMan47]

If the mag9 indeed puts out 1200 gph, you have more than enough circulation for a FW tank. As Sploke said, the actinics are OK for coral but don't do much for the plants in a FW set up. I run about 2 WPG on a FW and can grow a wide variety of plants that are labelled as low ligh or medium light. I use 6700K bulbs and find them to work fine for my plants. The 10000K bulbs might look more like the reef lighting you are accustomed to but are not needed except for esthetics. In my own opinion, the 6700s look more like daylight than the bluer 10000s.

[Danyal]

if you like the look of the actinitic combo then go ahead and use it. 900gph is going to be fine, you could easily go up to more if you wanted but unless you want some stream fish then there'd be no need to spend the money on an upgrade, if it were my tank i'd probably run all 4 VHO or 3 and throw the mag7 on a closed loop and stuff that tank full of plants.

[Myles O' Fish]

Shortee:
I'm in the exact same boat as you it looks like. I also had metal halides but I'm thinking those might fry any plants I try to add. Make sure to follow up about those VHOs. I'm interested to see if the livestock/plants will handle it okay.

[0live]

Actinic means the blue spectrum...and this light is not very beneficial to plants

I thought plants used light in the blue and red spectrum.