Hailde or bust! :p

They have 150w at J&L, maybe they make 250w

This is starting to sound very familiar :-) Pretty sure I've been down this road before. The last time I checked which was about a year go and the year before that, they didn't have DE 250 watt bulbs. Maybe that's changed, I'll have to look. If they do, then ya, that's a no brainer! I love Radiums (that I've seen on other tanks).

Sorry, no go

http://premiumaquatics.com/articles/radium

kien, have you tried to contact Phoenix directly? Their site however is only in Japanese. Got any Japanese friends?

Cool, I hadn't read that article before. Let's try to remember it the next time I'm hunting for halides, because this quesiton comes up often :-)

No I have not. I don't need to worry about this until December(ish). It is a long ways from now so a lot of things can change. For example, maybe I will have joined the cool kids and gotten myself updated with an LED fixture by then. Of course, by that time all the cool kids will have moved onto the next big thing like plasma lights, or something.

I tried out the xm20k bulb and I really like it, quite blue

lights out..
 

Well, it's official.. my beloved light fixture has given up the ghost. Last year it was a blown ballast which I easily replaced (thanks to some grow-op suppliers on Amazon), but now one of my light fixtures is blowing out bulbs :cry: At at first I thought it was just a dead bulb so I ordered a new one (they're $78 now). As soon as I plugged it in, POOF. $78 up in a proverbial puff of smoke. It's not the ballast this time because I've done the ballast musical chairs thing to test them all out and they all work fine. There must be a circuit inside the fixture that's shorted or something. I'm not an electrician and I don't really want to spend the time to crack it open to debug it further so I am officially on the hunt for a new light fixture now.

Sadly, I may have no choice but to go LED. If I can I'd like to go hybrid LED/T5. Actually, if I can, I'd like to get a whole new Halide/T5 fixture! I think Giessmman still makes them?

Haha, Radions on the way... And you can tweek the spectrum to make the corals any color you want. Blue and black to some, and white and gold to others...:razz:

Yep!

Have a look at the Giessmman spectra.

That is the fixture I decided to go with on our new cube display.