I have a 55 gallon cichlid tank with artificial plants and lots of rocks. I recently put a solid black background. The tank looks kinda dark now with the lights on. I just have 2 regular 15W aquarium lights and was wondering if there is anything better that I can use to make it look brighter. Thanks!
Aquarium light
- Thread starter rahimsach
- Start date
Get thee to Lowes or Home Depot and get a twin tube shop light (Lowes has them in stainless finish). Two 40 watt tubes and Voila! 80 watts of light!
Bit "Ghetto", but it works!
Here's mine:
Bit "Ghetto", but it works!
Here's mine:
maybe switch it to compact florescent like from ahsupply.com or get a couple of the screw in compact screw in light bulb.
Ahsupply.com is a great place if you want to go the DIY approach to increasing light levels. Those 18" bulbs are your current limiting factor and while changing bulbs may help it shouldn't make a dramatic change. If you are wanting to keep things looking fairly "stock" and don't feel comfortable wiring up your own lights you can try something like all glass single deluxe striplight 48oak. More than likely you'll have to do a bit of cutting on the plastic to get it to fit right, but it can be done relatively easily.
Quick edit:
An 18" t8 bulb should put out about 850 lumens or so, but a 48" t8 can put out closer to 2800 lumens depending upon the bulb. That plus a better reflector should give you a pretty good increase of light.
Quick edit:
An 18" t8 bulb should put out about 850 lumens or so, but a 48" t8 can put out closer to 2800 lumens depending upon the bulb. That plus a better reflector should give you a pretty good increase of light.
I recently put two 15W, 18", 18000K Aqua-Glo bulbs over my 55, and while the spectrum is great and makes everything look beautiful they seemed a little dim. So I added a socket for a secondary 10W aquarium compact fluorescent in each hood. It was a simple mod. I had to cut away some of the inner plastic bulb housing to make room for the bulbs, and then just added $1.59 sockets from Home Depot to each one. I can squeeze two of the CF bulbs in there if I cut a bit more material out and move the transformer from where it's currently attached. I also added LED moon lights (horray for $0.75 leftover Christmas lights!).
Jaysn, did you install the moon lights inside the hood. Would it be possible to see a photograph of that? I am planning to do a similar modification as you. btw does it get pretty hot with two bulbs?
Yeah, the LEDs are in the hood. I don't have a pic, but they're just wedged in between the white "reflector" and black outer shell on the front side. I drilled ~20 3/8" holes around where I relocated the transformer on the hood that I added the 2 10W bulbs to, as it was getting a bit warm and didn't have any of the stock venting where it ended up. There's a thread here that shows the schematic I used for my LEDs, although eventually I'm going to put them on a DC circuit instead of AC.