on the topic of lights

Swimfins

Swimfins

This is as good as it gets.
Sep 24, 2004
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Montreal Quebec Canada
community.webshots.com
Good Saturday afternoon:

Re: pc lighting. Today I bough a sylvania grow lux bulb 40 watt for my fluroscent fixture. I was going to replace 2 55watt 'blue actininc' bulbs for 2 daylight ones. Someone I know at my LFS told me that the blue I have is not 'true blue actinic' as requred for marine tanks. He says its a white bulb with a blue tint (cheap copy of the marine bulb). He told me to try sandwiching it between the two white 55 watt pc bulbs in this fixture and putting the 40 watt grolux bulb in front. I did, and the look is really nice.
Its crisp. The color of the fish look nice. I don't know what it will do for growth, but I'm going to see.


Any thoughts on this? :confused:
 
K rating has little do to with plant growth up to 10,000K, IMO.
If you like the look and you have the wattage, you are good to go.:)

Len
 
so whether a 3000k bulb or a 6500k bulb is used makes relatively no difference for plants?
i thought people tend to go towards the 6000k+ range, which is why i got some, but if you're saying it makes no difference then i might try some different K bulbs
 
Remmy said:
so whether a 3000k bulb or a 6500k bulb is used makes relatively no difference for plants?
i thought people tend to go towards the 6000k+ range, which is why i got some, but if you're saying it makes no difference then i might try some different K bulbs
Click to expand...

Theoretically, it doesn't make a difference to plants, but they prefer 4500 - 10000 K.

The lower the K number, the more yellow the bulb will look, so if you choose to go with 3000 K bulbs, it'll look really yellow to human eyes, but to plants, they won't really care, as long as there's enough light
 
Example: The first screw in CF bulb I got for my little 5 gal. was a 17 watt, 3100K bulb. The plants grew great........just as well as with the 6500K bulb I have over it now, which is actually 5 watts higher.
The difference was that the first bulb made everything in the tank look jaundiced.
It was much more pleasing to my eye to get the high K rating in there.

Len
 
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