How do you light your 60" tanks?

[Pinkey]

My question is this: since few manufacturers make 60" lights, what sizes do you get and how do you mount/hang/overlap them?

I have a 60" wide 24" deep tank that needs better lighting. I currently have a 60" Dustin's Double left over from an older tank which doesn't provide nearly enough light. I have another 60" x 18" deep that has a pair of Fluval 2.0 48" lights which overlap in the middle for about 2' providing a bright zone in the center that the plants love and still plenty of brightness to both ends of the tank.

The tank will be a low tech heavily planted tank using mostly easy-to-grow plants. I currently grow more Val than I can sell on CL and will be making a serious effort to only grow foreground and midground plants rather than filling the thing with 3' tall flowy grass. The point is I don't need ridiculous amounts of light or anything crazy exotic.

I'm pretty set on getting the Fluval 3.0 lights. They seem to be pretty amazing and have improved a lot since the 2.0 version. I am open to suggestions if you've fallen in love with something else.

 

[Pinkey]

I meant 72" tanks. They are both 72", not 60".

 

[dougall]

Most folks I know use a pair of 36" lights.

If you get something powerful enough for your needs (in 48"), you can have it mounted higher over the aquarium and it will more or less light the whole tank depending on how high it's mounted and the angle of any optics used in the light.

Personally the fluval 3 lights aren't really powerful enough for my tastes or the plants I grow, not does the spectrum work well for me (not sure how high CRI is, but I find it a fairly useless statistic anyway)

It also depends, if you don't want to suspend lights, on where any bracing is on a top frame or if you will have a top to the aquarium.

If you are growing lots of vals, and don't want anything more needy. Use that as a baseline see how the height of the aquarium compares and scale PAR appropriately

 

[Pinkey]

. . .Personally the fluval 3 lights aren't really powerful enough for my tastes or the plants I grow, not does the spectrum work well for me (not sure how high CRI is, but I find it a fairly useless statistic anyway). . .

What are your preferred lights?

 

[dougall]

What are your preferred lights?

Probably Chihiros or LEDstar mostly because of the spectrum and it's control of the light; at least in a display tank. For a farm tank I'm likely to use whatever is cheap and multiples of them where needed (say shop lights or flood lights) and they will grow fine.

Note that I don't really keep large tanks; if I were going to I would be looking at aquailluminations or radion.

 

[jake72]

ai freshwater blade makes a 72 inch long light and it is a pretty good light - not cheap - but not super expensive for the size. I have one on my discus aquarium. Mine is hung to give enough coverage for 24 inch wide aquarium but you can set it on the top - we used ghl hanging kit to hang it. Alternatively as mentioned you can use 2 or 4 36 inch light.

The blade is a bit more powerful than the fluval 3.0 but not as powerful as something like chihiros wrgb 2 pro. I find the blade more than powerful enough for my needs - my vague memory when i measured par is i could get over 120 par at the bottom on a 18 inch aquarium and reduce the lights to around 60% on those aquariums - i don't remember measuring par on the this aquarium.

Picture of my discus tank - i can get another that shows the light if you want to see it - this is just one i had taken yesterday:

 

[Pinkey]

ai freshwater blade makes a 72 inch. . .Picture of my discus tank

Your tank is beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing it. Thank you for the recommendation. Discus are such beautiful fish.

 

[FishAddict74]

My question is this: since few manufacturers make 60" lights, what sizes do you get and how do you mount/hang/overlap them?

I have a 60" wide 24" deep tank that needs better lighting. I currently have a 60" Dustin's Double left over from an older tank which doesn't provide nearly enough light. I have another 60" x 18" deep that has a pair of Fluval 2.0 48" lights which overlap in the middle for about 2' providing a bright zone in the center that the plants love and still plenty of brightness to both ends of the tank.

The tank will be a low tech heavily planted tank using mostly easy-to-grow plants. I currently grow more Val than I can sell on CL and will be making a serious effort to only grow foreground and midground plants rather than filling the thing with 3' tall flowy grass. The point is I don't need ridiculous amounts of light or anything crazy exotic.

I'm pretty set on getting the Fluval 3.0 lights. They seem to be pretty amazing and have improved a lot since the 2.0 version. I am open to suggestions if you've fallen in love with something else.

You could get 3 kessil a80 tuna suns with the gooseneck mount. Those should have no trouble growing plants and they look amazing with nice shimmer. I have two on my 75 mbuna tank

 

[Pinkey]

You could get 3 kessil a80 tuna suns with the gooseneck mount. Those should have no trouble growing plants and they look amazing with nice shimmer. I have two on my 75 mbuna tank

Your tank is beautiful. Seeing the vid/picture together is a very interesting reminder of how much invisible work goes into making the inside of the tank look good. I tend to see my tanks as giant jumbles of DIY projects rather than works of art. Everyone else's tanks, of course, are works of art.