Success with Daylight 6500K Spiral CFL

Which Tank Will Do Best

  • Tank 1

    Votes: 4 28.6%
  • Tank 2

    Votes: 3 21.4%
  • Tank 3

    Votes: 3 21.4%
  • Tank 4

    Votes: 4 28.6%

  • Total voters
    14
Rex is trying to find a better formula that applies to all tank sizes, it is by no means 100% accurate. From personal experience 70w over a 10g tank would be excessive. My tank at work has 64w over 12g and it is high light, could grow anything I threw at it and I've tried some pretty exotic plants with it. The growth rate was very fast, requiring almost weekly trimmings for the stem plants. I personally feel dropping to 50w would have been a better choice after my experience.
 
I'm hoping that you're right because it means that all of those small tanks will be able to be high light with very little spent.

I already have my regulator set up to run 13 tanks. I do need to find a cheaper solution for needle valves and learn how to build my own bubble counters and drop checkers.
 
I'm going to up the number of tanks to 5, so that I will end up with 3 bulbs per tank when I'm done. Tanks 1 - 5 will have correlating number of bulbs. i.e. Tank 3 will have 3 bulbs.

Plants:
anacharis
red temple
cabomba
indian fern
moneywort
pennywort
hornwort (if any of it actually survives...most of it disintegrated :( )
vals
and one other plant someone gave me that I can't remember what it is
 
the rex article on the lighting for small tanks bothers me... If you had a 55g tank but only filled it half way (22.5g), would you need twice as much light? Also, the sun isn't at the high intensity all day...

I vote for low light...
 
Why does it bother you? Maybe you're missing his point. Look at a tank as surface area in square inches it will make more sense. His idea is about lux per square inch which has nothing to do with the gallon capacity of the tank.
 
I guess I'm not sure why... it was provocative though. I'm reading through it again, I will start a new thread... I'm interested in discussing this further (without delving into any sort of flaming or any nasty stuff, just a conversation).
 
I can say from my own experience that 4wpg on a 10 gal tank is ample lighting for just about anything you can throw in the tank. I have had great success with 4wpg, CO2, and liquid ferts. There was practically nothing that I couldnt grow...the only limiting factor was the size of the tank, since you're running 6 different 10 gal tanks why dont you experiment to see which combination gives you the best results only altering the lighting situation?
 
I can say from my own experience that 4wpg on a 10 gal tank is ample lighting for just about anything you can throw in the tank. I have had great success with 4wpg, CO2, and liquid ferts. There was practically nothing that I couldnt grow...the only limiting factor was the size of the tank, since you're running 6 different 10 gal tanks why dont you experiment to see which combination gives you the best results only altering the lighting situation?

I already said that the only thing that will be different is the light.
 
I guess I'm not sure why... it was provocative though. I'm reading through it again, I will start a new thread... I'm interested in discussing this further (without delving into any sort of flaming or any nasty stuff, just a conversation).

http://www.rexgrigg.com/phpBB2/

You should check that place out. Maybe you'll find more like minded people there thinking about the same thing you are. You could still post your questions here too.
 
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