New Plants

[weezy0722]

I am new to the live plant thing. Sorry I do not have a pic however I have a 46 gallon bowed out tank with great filtration, and a 320 watt florecent light. I have a substraight made up of ferlight and tiny rocks, about 75-25 furlight to rock. Anyway I was wondering how much light they should be getting and if I can do anything to spurr on growth?

[djlen]

I am unfamiliar with 'ferlight', so I'm unable to help you with that,
but I'll tell you something.
You have got a TON (approx. 7 watts/gal.) of light over that tank and before you turn them on, I suggest you read all pertinent articles on this site:
http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/articles.htm
Then read our stickies on fertilization.
Then go to your nearest LFS and buy enough stem plants and floaters( Salvinia,Water Sprite, Egeria, etc.) to stuff that tank with.
You're going to need as many plants as you can put in there or you're probably looking at heavy duty algae issues down the road.
Two questions:
1. Can you turn on just a few of the lights at a time?
2. Do you intend to inject CO2?

Not to scare you.....more to prepare you. You're starting out with what many of us call a high tech tank when you have that much light, and you need to know how to balance that light with plants, fish and CO2(to push plant growth).

Len

[superjohnny]

Yea Len's right. With that much light, as a beginner, you're asking for trouble. Can you give us more information on the light? Is it one bulb or multiple bulbs? Compact fluorescent, metal halide, halogen, regular incandescent bulbs, high pressure sodium or what?

That'd be cool to have a 1,000w HPS light in your living room. I used to have one of those *cough* but I gave it to a *cough* friend. :p No, i never really used it. I only turned it on once and there was so much light coming out of my living room window (with the blinds closed mind you) that my neighbor thought there was a fire :eek:

[weezy0722]

its only 110 watts I was worng how does that change things

[djlen]

Huge difference!!
A little over 2watts/gal. Very manageable.
Do you mean Flourite instead of 'Ferlight'?
What kind of plants to you have, and how densely planted is the tank?
How long have they been planted?

Len

[weezy0722]

no I mean firlight it is a very light substrate my fish guy recomended. Anyway my tank has about 10 small plants in it, I guess thats not densely planted, the plants are spred pretty evenly around the tank as well, they have been planted about a week. Most of my plants come from FLA however as for there names I do not know (sorry I know I should) anyway they are pretty common.

[happychem]

I can't find "firlight", "ferlight" nor "furlight" on google with any reference to aquariums. Google may not know everything, but this would be the first time it couldn't find any reference of something!

It really does look very close to fluorite, although, I wouldn't call fluorite all that light...