Hi I have my 20gal SW cycling now with about 20lbs of live sand, 35-38lbs of LR and some Hermit and snails and such...I was wondering when it comes to marine lighting the whole point of having compacts of halides is to increase the wattage right? How much does the actull waves the light emits count, beside actinic or other waves whats the right blend or is more about the raw wattage that you can give your fish and corals. Now besides maybe some polups or annenomes i dont picture my tank becoming a reef setup but at this point i am running reg. old florecents untill i can upgrade the tank and the lighting system. For now even though the lights arnt powerful the tank is not tall, it is a 20long so any annenomes or polups would only be a few inchs from the lights what do you guys think? should i bother trying to find any of the specialty lights for reg. fl;orecent fixtures or will a white light and actinic bulb be good for now?
Lighting question
- Thread starter Andrew7769
- Start date
Lighting a tank for corals has little to do with raw wattage anymore. Each type of lighting (standard fluorescent, compact fluorescent, T5 HO, VHOs, metal halides, etc.) converts watts to light at different rates of effeciency, making a direct comparison between the different lighting types based solely on wattage very misleading.
Anemones are generally not recommended to be kept in a 20 long. Similarly, depending on the specific anemones you're looking to keep, some of them require far greater amounts of light than what standard fluorescent lighting can produce.
I wouldn't bother trying to replace the standard fluorescent bulbs with better standard fluorescent bulbs. If you want to keep organisms that rely heavily on light to survive, you should consider a complete lighting upgrade.
Anemones are generally not recommended to be kept in a 20 long. Similarly, depending on the specific anemones you're looking to keep, some of them require far greater amounts of light than what standard fluorescent lighting can produce.
I wouldn't bother trying to replace the standard fluorescent bulbs with better standard fluorescent bulbs. If you want to keep organisms that rely heavily on light to survive, you should consider a complete lighting upgrade.
thank you for your timely replys everyone, hopfully ill get some extra cash soon for lights, i was planning on saving up and getting a bigger tank but i couldent resist the deal on LR i got from my work...3$ a pound:grinyes:
I can speak from experience that upgrading based upon wattage isn't really the way to go. I was in the same boat as you with my 10G. I had a normal 10G fixture. I thought watts per gallon was the way to go and upgraded to a 96w PC. I instantly regretted it because there wasn't much of a difference and I already wanted to upgrade to a different lighting system for high light demanding coral. If you are going to upgrade in the future for corals then I would upgrade to at least T5s with individual reflectors.