Ambient Flourescents Help Growth?

Harlock

Harlock

Educated Idiot
Dec 15, 2004
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I had plants in my tank that were just way underlit, supposedly, due to their light requirements for about 2 weeks before I got my PC Fixture. It was odd though, as the plants didn't necessarily thrive, but they did okay. My parrots feather grew nicely, as did my Ludwigia ovalis. The two swords I had didn't grow much, but they did stay alive and grew a little.

I got to thinking about what on earth was keeping them all alive in a 29g (a tallish tank on its own) with only a 17 watt light in it. My answer came when I had to buy a lightbulb for my son's room. See, we had replaced all the incandescent lights in our main living areas a while back with the spiral 15 watt PC bulbs that have their own ballast. It was a money issue and I HATED changing all the bulbs in the living areas. Anyway, all of the ambient light my tank gets is flourescent and of course, the rooms are bright nough for us to live and read and work in.

I was curious, does anyone else think it is feasible that the ambient light may help plants to grow?
 
From my experience in physics, the ambient light probably does help the growth of your aquarium plants. But physics is not aquarium science.. hopefully in a year or two i'll be going into Marine Biology though.
 
Well, it is interesting. I know at least one of these bubls is angled directly at the tank, but at such a dustance you'd think it not worthy of note. But then again, if I can read and work in this light, maybe it is enough. I don't have the kind of equipment needed to test how much light the tank is getting, but maybe some is betetr than none in any case.
 
You lose so much light by just elevating fluorescents over the tank a few inches, rather than sitting directly on the tank, that I would say that you're not going to get much, if any extra lighting from a fixture across the room.
More likely, your plants would have eventually declined under 17watts and you will see a vast improvement in growth with your PCs.
I've seen 'ambient' sunlight from sliding glass doors located near a tank make a difference in plant growth, but that can be risky unless you have a way to control how much light gets into the room at different times of the year.

Len
 
A good rule of thumb when it comes to light...

When you double the distance from the source (lightbulb) to it's target (plants) the light that reaches is only 1/4 of the original strength (of what it was at half that distance).
 
It's been a while since Biological Oceanography, but if I recall, our ambient light normally supplies our living spaces with about as much light as the "1% light level"; the depth in the ocean where photosynthesis basically stops, where the light intensity is 1% of that just below the surface of the water.

I think that what you observed was plants growing using their stored nutrients and making due with the little light available.
 
Okay... so here's a stupid question... Do aquariums have to be illuminated only from the top? If you cannot increase the light in the aquarium hood, can you add light on the side.... or is that ridiculously stupid?
 
It's not rediculously stupid, but the execution would be tricky, to say the least. Gravity makes it easy to add a light fixture to the top of the tank.

The aesthetic problem is that plants grow towards the light, so if your light wasn't on the top your plants grow in twisted and bent.
 
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