Too much light?

Nope, extended photoperiod does not make up for shoddy lighting. Pick up two 25w daylight compact fluorescent bulbs from wal-mart, they're in the lighting section. It'll put you into the mid-light category.
 
The Walmart I went to before didn't have any but I'll try a different store and keep these 10 watts as a backup.
 
Yea, 26 watts of screw-in bulbs will give you maybe 15 watts of useable light. If you get 50 watts of screw-in bulbs, that'll be about 25-30 useable watts due to re-strike and the poor design of the spiral bulbs.

I haven't been able to find decent 23-25watt screw-in CF bulbs that fit, but if you do, please let me know where!
 
Home Depot also sells daylight CF bulbs, 25w, and they fit my 10 gallon hood.
 
You can also order them online. I bought 26W 6400K full spectrum screw in CF bulbs from 1000bulbs.com. They just barely fit into the incandescent hoods, but 52W of screw in over a 10 gallon tank is just enough to grow almost anything, restrike considered. I wrote a whole article about these bulbs and CF bulbs in general in my blog:

Freshwater Planted Aquarium Blog - Aquatic Eden

Also, the WPG rule doesn't hold true for tanks under 20 gallons:
There is a minimum light threshold. The best way I can explain it is this:

If I had a coffee mug with java moss in it and could put a 1 watt fluorescent bulb over it, if you figure the coffee mug holds 16 ounces, ( big cup), then you have 1 watt over 1/8 of a gallon or 8 watts per gallon. Wow, that java moss should really be growing with all of that light now, eh? It won't. More likely it'll die and turn into mush. That 1 watt bulb cannot provide enough light intensity for that moss no matter what you do to that bulb, even though you have " 8 watts per gallon". If a plant has to have "xyz" amount of intensity and the bulb can only provide "x" , then it doesn't matter how many watts per gallon it is.

That is why on smaller tanks, the WPG rule is out the window. On very large tanks, it is also out the window. You'll get the most out of the WPG rule with tanks 20-90 gallons (approximately).
Click to expand...

In other words, plants need a minimum intensity. So for a 10 gallon tank, you may as well figure you have a 20 gallon and calculate wpg that way. So my 52W is equivalent to 2.6wpg on a 10 gallon tank.
 
I went ahead and ordered two 20 watt 5000K CF bulbs from 1000bulbs.com. I thought about the 26 watt bulbs, but they would exceed the wattage rating of the hood, plus they would too tight of a fit for my hood. With the 20watt bulbs, I'll still probably be somewhere in the moderate range, but it should be enough for what I want to grow.
 
Talk about Murphy's law, I went to a different Walmart today to do some other shopping and thought I would wander over to the lighting section to see what they had. Sure enough they had some 20w 6500k about 1100 lumens with the U-shaped tubes instead of spirals. I hadn't seen the U-shaped bulbs anywhere, at Homedepot or Lowe's. From what I have read, these are better as far as restrike is concered. Is this correct? I should have bought more since they were on clearance.
I have put the new bulbs in and also some fertilizer spikes in the gravel around the plants. I'm hoping my lilies will flower now.
 
The U shaped bulbs are slightly better, but not much better. They still have bends and overlaps, but not as much. The same thing happened to me, I went to my local Wal-Mart and found nothing. Then I went to another one further away and they had them. It seems like not all Wal-Marts carry them, or it could just be that Wal-Mart, for all its logistical glory, can't keep items stocked consistantly. No surprise there.
 
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